


The Blooming Bellflower

by orphan_account



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Female Character of Color, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Genderswap, I made Bilbo black and trans basically, Trans Character, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:43:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 38,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1339192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bella Baggins would not say she is overfull of courage, but she has managed to survive this long, so she supposes she's strong enough to get on with.</p><p>Then she meets some dwarves (and a wizard).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Bella is Rightfully Nervous

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: hate speech, past dysphoria, trans character being outed as trans, outing-related anxiety, and general discomfort on the part of the main character.

There was nothing particularly special about Bella Baggins, from outward appearances. Her skin was perhaps browner than most of the Shire, but the Took line and their associated ancestral relations were well known for having an occasional darker vein of child, and it was not regarded as any bad thing that they came that way (and her mother had been such a beauty, after all, with her skin the color of cool earth at the start of spring). Bella’s hair was perhaps less lustrous than that of other hobbit lasses, pitch black and more coarse as often happened to darker skinned hobbits, but it curled and could be tidied and little more was expected of a young woman. Bella did not possess a particularly fair air or lively countenance in the way the Shire valued such things in women, but again, this was not a devilish thing, for all kinds of hobbits made a Shire, it was said. When a hobbit passed her on the road, they very often did not look twice--until they realized who it was they had seen in the first place. While all kinds of hobbits made a Shire, the Shire did not wish to be compromised of hobbits with her...inclinations, as the gentler folk called it.

Bella Baggins was, to tell the truth, a name whispered at many a teatime in the Shire, an old and favored subject for the men to puff their pipes over in consternation and for the women to turn venomous and cruel (or merely taciturn if they were of a sweeter nature, to give what little credit can be given to those who are not willingly cruel, only complicit).

“That Bilbo,” they would say, in between compliments on Miss Lavender Proudfoot’s latest attempt at lemon cakes, “needs to stop wearing lady’s dresses and start being sensible. At the rate he’s going he is going to cost every branch of the Baggins family their good reputation. Although, at least they ostracized him before he started that business with poor Reggie Blackthorn. If I were his mother, I would have knocked such unnatural inclinations out of him before they got so out of hand.”

Bella Baggins was not ignorant of what was said about her in the Shire, but for the most part, she chose to ignore it, as it was very upsetting and did her no good in getting on with her life. She had recently set herself up in Bree, where the Men thought so little of Hobbits in general that they did not suspect anything in the strength of her jaw or the blockiness of her fingers, and where the other hobbits only looked darkly on, muttering to themselves, It would not do to let the Men become aware of any weakness on the hobbits’ collective parts, even if they could not help it and had done their best to deal with it, if you please. Bella found Bree agreeable; while her dresses and possessions were embarrassingly modest, and she was most definitely the only Baggins in recorded history to work for Men, she had sense enough to realize this was probably the highest point her life would achieve, and so she bore it with good humor and as much peace in her heart as could be achieved.

More than anything else in her life, what would shock Bella later would be that all this, her entire troubled life’s history up leading up to her modest age of fifty, would seem but a prologue to the truer tale to come.

One summer’s night, as Bella was running frantically between guests with tankards of ale, doing her best to not particularly enrage any hobbits into muttering too much near her boss and trying not to be squashed underfoot by men, a dwarf strode into the inn. Dwarves were not wholly unusual, they came somewhat often to the Prancing Pony, but the entire table she was meant to be sorting out drinks for paused in their bawdy talk to give the dwarf the sort of looks that held evil portents. She did not actually look at him right away, but as she whirled and went to deposit yet more ale to greedy mouths she took note of the way several other patrons’ eyes tracked the same movement, and how the natural looseness of drink gave away as smoothly as it could to seriousness and a certain type of intent. Bella was sure, very suddenly, that she needed to ask Mr. Butterbur if she couldn’t take a moment to eat her dinner now.

As Bella turned, with the intent of searching out Mr. Butterbur and fleeing this tense situation immediately, she could not help the snort of amusement that escaped her at the sight of the cause of so much tension. He looked like a numpty of a dwarf! He was handsome, with a face untouched by most scars, telling of a better upbringing, and he wore fine furs on a heavy cloak over armor that...well, honestly she couldn’t tell if it was any good, but it ought to be, with a cloak that nice. What any male that had that much swagger was doing causing ire among such unsavory folk as were eyeing him, she could not begin to guess. Perhaps he was simply being eyed as an easy target for burglary and such unpleasantries. It did not matter; Bella would soon excuse herself, and let all this resolve itself with her own person well away from it.

A hand on her shoulder, overlarge and cold from the wind outside, caused Bella to freeze in place. She turned to face an expected rude customer, and found herself confronted by miles of gray robe and equally gray beard, topped by the greyest of pointed hats.

“Madam,” the tall man said, looking at her with a kindness that seemed a general affliction than a particular benediction, “If you would please, I think my companion and I will require two of your heartiest meals and ales. We will be at the table by the fire.”

To Bella’s horror, the tall gray man sat himself across from the rich dwarf.

Well. She could get their meals scraped up quick, and then run off to her own dinner. Surely that was not too much to accomplish.

Bella dashed behind the bar, finding Mr. Butterbur in the kitchens, glancing into his inn in a worried manner.

“Trouble’s brewin’, eh, lass?” he said to Bella, slanting her a look.

“Yes sir.” Bella grabbed plates and cutlery. “I was thinking, after I give those two their dinner, I really ought to--”

“You don’t even have to say it, lass. There’s too many weapons flashing about for a young lady to be near. You get that out there and you can be on call for the night.”

Sagging with relief, Bella turned to fill two tankards with the best ale of the inn; the dwarf could certainly afford it. That done, she served up hot fish from the stove, gave it some sides she was certain neither man nor dwarf would eat, and swooped plates and ale alike onto her serving tray and out the door.

As Bella drew up to the table, she saw that the man and dwarf were indeed friends, or at least, they seemed of an accord enough to bend both their heads over a grimy slip of paper covered in a language Bella was quite unfamiliar with. The gandalf was also uttering something entirely alarming about their being a price on the dwarf’s head, forcing Bella to put his ale before him rather more forcefully than she would usually, so he would cut himself off from anything more distressing.

“Thank you,” the gray man said as she served him his food, while the rich dwarf muttered something that leaned vaguely towards politeness. “Madam, I wondered if you might be so kind as to answer a question for me.”

Bella looked at him, wary. “What would that question be, sir?”

“I was simply wondering if you could refresh me on the way to Bag End down in Hobbiton from Buckleberry Ferry. It has been a very long time ere I have been in the Shire, and I admit I am not clear on the way.”

Bella started, but after a careful touch to her dress, subconsciously assuring herself that nothing overtly gave her away, she nodded respectfully. “The way is very easy, sir. The path leading to Bag End is edged by foxgloves, and each ensuing fork does so as well. You should know you have reached it when you see the red door and the oak tree above.”

“Thank you madam,” the gray man said, confused. “A red door, my, my. I did not think Bilbo Baggins would be so crass as to repaint his father’s work in such a color.”

Bella lowered her head as her heart quavered. “Miss Sackville-Baggins makes such decisions, not Bilbo. Good day.”

Bella turned and hurried away, as the gray man muttered something that sounded direfully speculative.

\--*--

By noon the next day, Bella had had the leisure to drink several bracing cups of her strongest hojicha blend tea and decide that the strange man who seemed familiar with her parents and intent on finding her (albeit in an entirely different set of circumstances than the ones she occupied) was not worth worrying about. Surely, he would go investigate Bag End, Lobelia would come to the garden gate and squawk at him for being within ten feet of her primroses, and his quest to find Bilbo Baggins would end there. No hobbit would dare speak of her to an outsider, and he would be frustrated in his attempts. He would not find her; she would be safe

This was all very simple and clear to Bella, and after cleaning her third bedroom that morning she felt relatively assured that all would be well. Bella straightened bedsheets and fluffed pillows and speculated that, really, everything was going to be fine.

Her fifth bedroom had clearly been let to a dwarf, and despite a rising anxiety, Bella was able to remark to herself at the state of it. “My! If this isn’t a treat.”

It was in fact, quite a boon to Bella, for it was nearly as neat as she had made it yesterday. The bedclothes were rumpled yet not entirely disheveled, and rather than strewing his belongings hither and yon as many dwarves tended, this dwarf seemed to have left his worldly possessions in a small set of saddlebags set upon the dresser. There was a bit of dirt and the chamber pot of course, and it would all need to be aired, but overall it would be a simple affair, and Bella smiled to herself in appreciation of such a neat man as she crossed to open the windows.

After Bella had emptied the chamberpot and swept the floor, just as she had unlatched the windows, there was the sound of the door behind her being unlocked and opened. As she shook the sheets out the window with a crisp snap, she half-turned over her shoulder, calling out, “Just a moment, sir, and I’ll be able to put the linens back on the bed and be out of your hair.”

There was a rumble of a noise, and, as Bella turned around with a growing horror, the gray man said, “Well, this is quite convenient.”

The gray man and the rich dwarf were standing in the doorway; well, the rich dwarf was standing, and the gray man was stooping, so as to not come in direct contact with the ceiling. The rich dwarf looked consternated and confused, looking between Bella and the gray man in clear befuddlement. The gray man, to her horror, looked like he had a seed of understanding, and was about to pursue it to its fullest flower.

“Sir?” Bella asked, holding the sheets up to her chin as her body moved automatically to place them again on the bed.

The gray man looked at his dwarf companion a moment, then chewed his lip. “Do you have a moment of time, madam? I have a few more questions to ask of you.”

Bella tucked her corners. Had he managed to guess, somehow, been able to tell? Did he mean to hurt her? Perhaps he meant for her to buy his silence. Oh dear Yavanna, she hoped not. What little she’d been able to take with her from Bag End she’d already bought several silences with. She had precious else she could bargain to maintain her fragile peace in Bree, and it wasn’t like there was anywhere else for her to go. She could not see how this could end in anything but the direst of scenarios, and her heart seized with anxiousness, and her fingers trembled with her fear.

Bella smoothed the sheets to her satisfaction and gave the gray man a wobbly curtsy. She cast her eyes over the rich dwarf; was the gray man going to involve him in this? “Certainly, sir.”

The gray man looked at the rich dwarf as well, and bent to murmur something in the rich dwarf’s ear. Bella could not imagine what it was the gray man said, for the rich dwarf merely shrugged and walked out the door.

The gray man locked the door behind the rich dwarf and sank into the chair in the room with a happy sigh, rolling his neck. “Occupying hobbit-sized spaces does give one rather a crick in the neck.”

Bella scooped up the blanket from the floor and crossed to the window to shake it out. The end was quite dirty; had the rich dwarf worn his shoes to bed? That couldn’t be comfortable. “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

The gray man huffed, as if she had said something of but light amusement. “Please, call me Gandalf. Tell me, how long have you been a maid at the Prancing Pony? I do not remember your presence among the staff the last time I found myself in Bree.”

“Four months, sir.” Bella snapped the blanket in the breeze, shutting her eyes against the grit that blew back.

“I see. And how were you employed before that time?”

Was he really going to attempt some subtle way to get at her secrets, attempt to catch her in a lie? Bella thought not. It was one thing to be in danger, but another entirely to be toyed with. In one fluid motion she pulled the blanket from out the window and smacked it onto the bed; it was crooked, but that was rather not her concern at the moment. She looked square into the eyes of the gray man. “Please, if you know what I think you do, just ask me directly. This nonsense produces nothing but empty air.”

Gandalf nodded. “You are, or were depending on the perspective, Bilbo Baggins of Bag End.”

Bella pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. “Yes. I was born Bilbo Baggins.”

“Yet here you are.” The statement connoted a variety of things she ought to have been, what he had expected of her; a man, ensconced in Bag End, rich enough to while away her hours reading and puffing on a pipe, wearing a waistcoat and trousers, calling herself Bilbo Baggins with pride and untroubled knowledge of the truth of it.

But such was not the reality of things. Bella inclined her head. “Here I am.”

Gandalf smiled, and it was kind in a way that was entirely unexpected, a genuine kindness, only minorly tinged with pity. “Oh, Bella Baggins, you really are your mother’s daughter.”

Bella did not know how to handle that, being called a ‘daughter’ so plainly and simply, somewhere outside of her own head. “You would call me her daughter? As simply as you would call any woman that?”

“It is what you propose yourself to be, and I would not presume to know your heart better on this matter. Even wizards cannot divine a heart better than its owner.”

Wizards? Did he mean to say he was one? Well, that explained the pure nosiness, as well as the preternatural knowledge. Bella felt a scratching of a memory, something of long ago, with fireworks… “Oh! You visited the Shire, when I was small. You did know my mother.” 

“Oh, yes. We had an adventure, long ago. I was truly sorry to hear of her passing.”

“Yes. It was hard to continue without her.” Donna touched the hair clip she had gathered her curls in; it was a simple thing, wrought brass depicting a bird in flight. It had been a favorite of Belladonna Baggins. “I named myself after her, you know. I thought, afterwards...perhaps she wouldn’t have been ashamed.”

“You never told her?”

"Tell her?” Bella laughed, harsh and cold. “I had no idea what I was. All I knew was that it took all of my will not to run my hands over her dresses. I thought I was destined to be a tailor.”

“That changed, presumably.”

“Yes. After she died, so soon after my father...I was all alone in Bag End. I found myself wearing her skirts around the house. Growing out my hair. One day, as I was putting on trousers to go to market, I found I simply couldn’t. It made something inside me scream, to put on the trappings of a man. I’d always felt miserable in public. So I put on my skirts and I walked outside, and for the moment I stood outside my door, I felt wonderful.

“But of course, such things are improper,” Bella finished in a rush, embarassed at her own forthrightness. “So here I came to rest. Mr. Butterbur doesn’t know Bella Baggins was not born that way, so I’ll thank you very kindly not to tell him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Gandalf informed Bella, entirely solemn. “That is entirely crosswise to my purpose in speaking to you.”

“Then what, pray tell, is your purpose? You seem to have gone to quite an effort to find me. Were you looking for me, this morning?”

“No; I was securing provisions with Mr. Oakenshield, whom you just met briefly. I had inklings since last night, and it took only a moment of Mr. Butterbur’s time, and crossing your path again, to confirm my idea.”

“Well, I hope you did not give him too much to muse on.”

Gandalf shook his head. “I suspect I did not. I may have suspected something, but I am old, and I have seen many things. And besides which, I knew your mother well enough to see her likeness in yours almost immediately, although I could not place the reason for it at that moment.”

Bella nodded. “So, if you would not mind being direct, sir, what did cause you to go to so little trouble, as you have claimed, to find me?”

“To ask you if you should like to join in an adventure.” Gandalf grinned, and Bella was not sure she liked that at all.


	2. In Which Bella Is Embarassed and Embarks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gandalf tries, but he is not that good at being thoughtful.
> 
> Triggers in this chapter: hate speech, people being inconsiderate, assumed sexism, suicidal ideation, main character being publicly embarrassed both accidental and purposeful, unnecessarily long end notes, really they're just me rambling about why i made it different skip if you want to.

Bella had said maybe. Then she had seen the twelve other dwarves trash her dining room, with their leader arrogantly looking on, and she had said no. Then, the next morning, she found the contract caught under a chair leg, several bootprints smudging its attempts at formality and grandeur, and she had said, _yes_ , in the quiet absoluteness of her soul. Somehow, even after all the parts that made up her life, in the very most private places of herself, she dreamed that, somewhere she hadn’t discovered yet, there was a place where she might yet belong, with no conditions or exceptions. So that is how she found herself running after thirteen dwarves and a wizard, her pack half-open still, in the bare beginnings of the morning.

 

Consequently, that was how Bella found out that her being hired in an insofar unspecifed capacity on an insofar unspecified quest, was in fact, insofar unspecified to anyone but Gandalf himself. Because of course, Gandalf thought it most expedient, and most amusing, to simply mention her specificites and in fact existence not at all.

 

Bella stood, breathing hard and attempting to press her hair into some order as the rich dwarf at the head of the train looked down at her. “Thank you for returning our contract, madam, but--”

 

“Bella!” Gandalf cried. “I did not manage to introduce you to your new employer properly. Bella, this is Thorin Oakenshield, lately of Ered Luin, and leader of this Company. Thorin Oakenshield, this is Bella Baggins.”

 

Thorin Oakenshield looked at Gandalf in open horror. “You said you were looking for a burglar, not a maid! And you said they had declined!”

 

“Well, it seems Miss Baggins changed her mind. People do that, Mister Oakenshield.” Gandalf seemed entirely amused by the whole endeavor.

 

Bella was not. “You didn’t tell them?!”

 

“Well, you declined, so it did not seem necessary to make the proper introductions.”

 

“I declined last night!” Bella stamped her foot, and resisted the urge to color as feelings of utter foolishness rose in her throat like a flood. “I was considering the post for most of yesterday! You did not think to even discuss that you had discussed this with me in all that time?”

 

Thorin Oakenshield did not seem best pleased with Gandalf, at that. “Gandalf?”

 

“Well, I mentioned I had talked to my burglar.”

 

“You did. And prior to that you mentioned looking for a Mister...Baggins, I think it was.” Thorin Oakenshield frowned deeply. “You seem to have been asking every hobbit in your vaguest acquaintance.”

 

“And you chose to spring a woman and a serving girl on them after the fact, when all was signed and sealed,” Bella added. She had lost the battle with her own blush. “Gandalf, I do not know how wizards conduct the business of employment, but it seems rather that you must brush up on your niceties. Now, good day.”

 

“Where are you going?” cried Gandalf. “You only just arrived.”

 

Bella gestured at Thorin Oakenshield as best as she could without actually looking at him. “I don’t know if you’ve been privy to the conversation we all were just having, but apparently this ‘adventure’ that you chose not to specify overmuch on requires a burglar, which I am not, and is in fact a title I dare not associate with, considering I make my living in part by looking after people’s things. Furthermore, this company does not seem overfond of taking a woman, whom they were told nothing about and is not a burglar, along. I would think, you being a conscientous man in some quarters, that you would have at least specified that you considered womanhood and lack of experience as minor obstacles to employment. Lastly of all, you have forced me to have this conversation in the street, which I am entirely uncomfortable with!”

 

Thorin Oakenshield frowned. “I do not--”

 

“Baggins!” came a sudden shout from behind Bella.

 

Bella pointed behind her, still glaring pointedly at Gandalf. “Now, see what you’ve done.”

 

Bella turned to face the voice, and found an entirely expected yet still entirely mortifying crowd of people looking at her and the party of dwarves with morbid interest. Just making her way to the front was Marjorie Cotton, an older hobbit whose face resembled a bulldog on its good days and a dead fish on its bad ones. (It was a small comfort that this was a very bad day indeed.)

 

Well, it wasn’t Lobelia, and Bella thanked Yavanna for that small mercy. “What do you require, Missus Cotton?”

 

“I wish I could be surprised,” Marjorie Cotton proclaimed, her hands on her hips as she tossed her curls back. She probably meant to look superior and refined; she looked sweaty and gave rather too much of a look into her nostrils. “First you engineer your own exile from Bag End, and now you seek to become the comfort... _item_ of dwarves.” Marjorie seemed to consider further barbs that would land rather too close to the nose, but there were too many humans in the immediate vicinity, and she clearly, barely, kept herself in check. “At this rate you will bring down the Tooks as well as the Bagginses, and all of us related to either family. Will you not think of what you are doing to the Shire?”

 

“I am no comfort girl, and I am doing nothing to the Shire,” Bella spat, because really, she was not an angry person, but she was already worked up and today was going to be a bad day, no matter how she insulted Marjorie Cotton. “Marjorie Cotton, I do not make your business mine, so I would ask you to not make mine yours.”

 

“Your business is the business of all hobbits,” Marjorie declared. “You will be dealt with, Bella Baggins, by Yavanna or the Shire, before you hurt us all. I guarantee it.”

 

“That’s as may be. But I would thank you not to yell at me in the street about it, it is not a quality that reflects well on anyone.” She looked pointedly at Gandalf, who seemed rather surprised to be implicated. “And if the Shire wishes to deal with me, they know where I have gone. You may tell them that I do wish they would simply get it over with, if they don’t desire to let Yavanna do her own work.”

 

“If they do ‘get it over with’, Miss Baggins,” a rumbling voice intoned behind her, getting off its horse and standing beside her, “I suspect, as of today, they will find rather a lot of blades will respond in kind.”

 

It was Thorin Oakenshield--or rather, Thorin Oakenshield’s boots, attached to a body that had the voice of Thorin Oakenshield, as far as Bella could tell for certain (she did not quite dare to look close enough to his face for confirmation). His hand was heavy, and warm and large on Bella’s shoulder. “Bella Baggins is rightfully employed by our Company, and I will not hear such threats towards her. In most systems of government I have come across, such words against someone in my employ would give me right to make a legal suit against them. Or, are things different in the Shire?”

 

Marjorie Cotton colored deeply, because they weren’t. “I did not threaten _‘Miss Baggins,’_ simply remind Baggins of how things are. Your Miss Baggins disregards it often enough that there needs must be reminders. But let the Baggins do what the Baggins likes. Perhaps Bella will die in your Yavanna-forsaken wilds, and rid us all of such foolishness.”

 

Marjorie Cotton turned on her foot, stomping away. (To Bella’s mortification, several of Marjorie’s children, who of old would come by Bag End to hear Bella’s stories, slipped out of the crowd and followed Marjorie, shooting Bella poisonous looks.) The assembled onlookers looked at Thorin and the majority seemed to decide that going about their business was the most suitable course of action.

 

Bella Baggins sagged, stumbling away from Thorin Oakenshield. “Thank you, sir. Your words were kind, but I do not think you realize that now you must prove them true.”

 

“I realize,” he replied, looking at her like she was an idiot. “Bofur, bring Myrtle here.”

 

A Dwarf that looked quite disheveled, even for a dwarf, negotiated his pony to the front of the crowd, holding the reins of a pony burdened with packs and a thick blanket across the middle of his back.

 

Bella stared up at the saddle, which was just above her head. “I am not sure I can--”

 

“You just stared down a stampeding hobbit,” Gandalf remarked, still all good humor, the blasted male that he was. “I am sure you can handle a pony.”

 

“Yes, but--” Bella huffed. “How do I get on it?”

 

Thorin, to the obvious perplexment of the disheveled dwarf holding Myrtle’s reigns and the equally obvious surprise of Gandalf, knelt in the mud before the pony. “I can boost you.”

 

“Oh!” Bella blushed, and pushed down her skirts, willing them to cover more than they were inclined to. “I suppose I could--wait a minute! You said I was in your employ.”

 

“You are. You signed the contract.” Thorin Oakenshield frowned. “Or did you change your mind again?”

 

“But--!” Bella looked at him, and wanted to object that Marjorie Cotton had neither turned her into a burglar nor a man. That surely, all parties must have the same objections they had at the outset to their conversation. But Thorin’s face was dark and forbidding, boding no good response to questions, and he was at least in his actions willing to take her on, with all her stated inexperience.

 

Bella had left her little room in the Prancing Pony, set out with all the world would allow her to own for the second time in her life, for a reason. As much as she found her life acceptable, it was only that. She was barely useful--she knew she was terribly slow in comparison to the other maids, and had only been kept on because she would work late in the night, unlike the women of the Men. She was regularly snubbed, sneered at, and threatened by her own people. She lay awake at night sometimes, when she couldn’t stop herself, filled with fear and self loathing. Would it be so awful of her to follow this band of dwarves, even with the stated intent that she steal things? Surely her reputation did not need to be considered, as it did not exist. And perhaps, if she could learn, if she could be better, and away from hobbits and the Shire and all they represent, she could...do better. Be better at her job, at least, if not happier.

 

And if she failed, she would probably die, and that would be a lot easier than simply failing again. She would be a fool, to not take advantage of this dwarf’s own foolishness.

 

“A-alright, then. Do I just, put my foot in your hands, or?”

 

“Yes.” Thorin looked down, and seemed taken aback. “You’re not wearing shoes.”

 

“Of course not!” Bella shook her head. “And I will not wear them either! Goodness me.”

 

Thorin frowned, but he did not say anything. Instead, he cupped his hands, and held them out expectantly.

 

Bella stepped her right foot into the cup of his hands, and a moment later, she found herself with either leg astride the pony. She looked down, and blushed furiously. She was fortunate she had chosen to wear her mother’s old dress, rather than the one she usually wore when serving. It was an older gentlewoman’s design in deep maroon, and while it was entirely unfashionable, it had a longer skirt than her work dress and indeed most dresses in the Shire; it was also a softer, more pliable material, made to rest lightly upon a properly arranged petticoat as opposed to being stretched out upon a hoop skirt. So, upon the pony, it spread and puddled around her, actually touching her ankles at her sides and spreading behind her onto the pony’s backside, giving her as much modesty as a woman could have with her legs spread so. Bella realized she would have to continue wearing this dress to preserve her modesty upon a pony, and she wondered how she would manage to wash it.

 

Bella blushed furiously, but leanned forward in her seat, respectfully bowing to the dwarf looking up at her. “Thank you, sir.”

 

Thorin Oakenshield bowed shortly in return and turned to his own pony, a dark one that made her own look small and dainty. He barely seemed to touch the pony at all before he was astride it, turning it to point once again towards the road out of Bree.

 

“If there’s nothing else you wish to surprise us with, Gandalf?” He asked, looking sourly at the wizard.

 

Gandalf inclined his head. “Nothing at all, Master Oakenshield.”

 

“Then we ride.” Thorin kicked his pony into movement, and the other ponies moved as one with his.

 

Bella realized, as her pony surged forward entirely without her interference, that she was on an adventure now, really and truly.

  
“Oh sweet Yavanna,” she muttered, and hoped she wouldn’t mangle it too badly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! Gandalf's introduction of hobbit to dwarves and vice versa wasn't very graceful in the book/movie--he literally sends the dwarves to Bilbo's door and assumes his manners will extend far enough that he will gracefully consider an offer of employment. I mean, it does work, but Bilbo's manners are very extensive, and I think his curiosity is what keeps him from straight rejection than anything else. So with Bella Baggins being minus one Bag End, I had to consider how Gandalf would introduce the dwarves to her and vice versa; and I realized he most probably wouldn't. This isn't the only way to go about it, I suppose, but I needed Marjorie Cotton to happen, so public embarassment it was. Forewarning, or foregladness depending: the next three chapters are a bit stricter to the events of the movie re: trolls and such. I don't see any reason why they would be especially different, and I wanted the next few chapters to reflect Bella's feelings about being on the quest. If you're a fan of canon deviation, chapter six onward will be doing a lot more of that. So whatever your preferences, you've been warned.
> 
> Also, I didn't realize until editing that I'd written Marjorie using the proper pronouns. Which, unfortunately, she would not, so they had to go. :( Fortunately outright misgendering Bella would give too much away for Chapter Two, so I was able to avoid writing that. I might not be able to in the future, so small mercies.
> 
> Also also, broodinghunx on tumblr has drawn an Angel Coulby-inspired Bella Baggins that looks very similar to how I imagine Bella Baggins for this fic. With the exception that I picture her in a high-necked dress, because she would do her best to conceal her lack of cleavage. Here is the link: http://broodinghunx.tumblr.com/post/40074331193/aaaaangel-angel-coulby-the-bravest-little
> 
> Have a good day friends!


	3. In Which Bella Does Not Contemplate Trousers For A Moment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: dysphoria, dysphoria-based clothing aversions, perception of sexism.

Bofur, the disheveled dwarf that had brought her pony forward to be mounted, rode beside Bella, more by default than any particular inclination, she was sure. They were quiet, listening to the others laugh and toss around snatches of joyous songs, until Bofur turned to look at her. Bella could tell by the slightly amused look to his face that it had to do with the way she was flailing about on Myrtle's back.

 

“Miss,” Bofur said, “You don’t seem to have ever ridden a pony.”

 

Bella tossed her curls out of her eyes. “It really is that obvious, isn’t it. And please, call me Bella Baggins.”

 

“Miss Baggins.” Bofur inclined his head. “You’ve got to grip the pony with your legs. Holding the reigns alone won’t be much help--you’ll give Myrtle an awful crick in the neck. You really only need to pull on your reigns if you’re needing to change direction or stop.”

 

“Oh. Watching others ride horses and ponies, it seems, does not give one a proper idea of how it's done,” Bella admitted. She attempted to squeeze the horse with her legs; it kept her from bobbing so much, at least. “Thank you for your advice, Master Bofur. Although--is that your last name? Or your first? I am not sure I am quite comfortable of calling men I am in the employ of by their first name.”

 

“That’s quite flattering, Miss Baggins, but you’re under the command of Thorin Oakenshield, as are we all.” Bofur seemed a jolly sort, his eyes twinkling and his cheeks dimpling easily. Bella tentatively decided she liked it--he resembled the more easygoing of hobbitkind, and as a plus, he was _not_ a hobbit, so he would not be yelling at her (that she knew of). “I’ll thank you to call me Bofur, and you’ll be calling most of this company by their first names alone. Thorin is a bit remarkable by having a last name at all.”

 

“Oh!” Bella had not thought dwarves would have entirely different naming conventions. “Then why do you call me Miss Baggins? And how do you tell each other apart? You can’t all have different names.”

 

“Although it's not our way, we know what's polite in other cultures. You make a fair point about names; all of us have different names on this Quest, but in any Dwarven settlement or kingdom you'll come across five Durins or three Narvis on any given day. We usually differentiate between dwarves by parentage. For example, I would be known to most dwarves as Bofur, son of Izikhmel.”

 

“Oh. Well that’s sensible enough.” Bella supposed, if lineages were tracked well and recorded by relevant government systems, that system could work quite well. “Thank you, Master Bofur, for instructing me again about what I did not know. I had thought only Elves and Wizards went by just their first names.”

 

“Oh no,” Gandalf rumbled, his tall horse pulling up and casting Bella into shadow, “You will find hobbits, the Bombadils, and the few men who have adopted the custom are the exception and not the rule.”

 

Bella leaned back to look up at Gandalf, feeling rather put off at Gandalf for continuing to be so very tall, in addition to his general faults. “What exactly is a Bombadil?”

 

“That is something we should all like to know,” Gandalf replied, smiling at her like she was a particularly quick child. “Master Bofur, would you mind if I spoke a moment with Miss Baggins?”

 

“Not at all, Mister Wizard,” Bofur said, and with a doff of his cap, pushed his pony forward. Bella found that she and Gandalf were now some little distance behind the rest of the group, far enough to not be overheard.

 

Perfect, Bella, thought, and turned to fully catch Gandalf’s eye. “I am not pleased with you, Gandalf. Exactly how did you think not informing Thorin Oakenshield of the particulars of his own employee would play out?”

 

“I admit I did not think it would bother you overmuch,” Gandalf said, with true surprise coloring his features. “It seemed to me rather awkward to explain, you see. I did not see how to explain how I had come to speak to you in the first place.”

 

“You could have said I was a cousin of Bilbo Baggins. You could have said _anything_ , Gandalf, instead of brandishing me like one of your fireworks.” Bella knew she was getting too overworked on this subject. Gandalf had not particularly engineered the scene in Bree, after all; he couldn’t have known she was going to change her mind. “I am sorry, but I do not enjoy being something that is subjected on people. It has been a more common feature in my life than I would like, and it does not become more welcome with repetition.”

 

Gandalf sighed, and placed his hand quite gently on her shoulder. “I did not consider it that way, Bella. Please forgive my oversight.”

 

“Well. No harm done, I suppose.” Bella looked at the backs of the company she would now be keeping, and felt strangely distant from it all. It was as if the transition from her old life to this harebrained idea, had been so sudden that her wits had yet to keep pace. “I cannot help but worry what they think of me, after that scene.”

 

“I would not worry,” Gandalf said, withdrawing his hand to resume his grand airs. “They could explain it better, but a dwarf would not see you as the lesser for being harassed by Marjorie Cotton and her ilk.”

 

“And by her ilk, you mean everyone who knows my secret. Except you, I suppose.”

 

“I am exceptional,” Gandalf allowed, grinning. “But not, I think, as exceptional as you believe.”

 

Bella was truly amused now. “Ha! I think I would forget the land itself if I were ever to find such a one as you, Gandalf.”

 

“You never know. There are four other wizards in Middle Earth, and we have much of Middle Earth to cover before this is done. But, before we rejoin the company: I actually pulled you aside to ask you a question.”

 

“Please, ask it of me, Master Wizard.”

 

“I know they are distressing,” Gandalf began. “But might you consider wearing trousers? They would not affect the perception of your womanhood amongst dwarves, and I think you’ll find they’re much better for riding astride as you are.”

 

Bella glared at him.

 

“Or not. Let us catch up to Nori and Dori just there, Bella, I see them beginning to scuffle, and it would be inauspicious to begin such a journey with squabbles. You’ll find a pony will move forward if you dig your heels into its sides.”

 

Bella complied, and after a long moment of frustrated digging at what seemed to be a portion of the pony made of solid bone, Myrtle started trotting behind Gandalf’s tall horse, snorting in such a way that Bella did not think she’d had anything to do with Myrtle’s forward momentum.

 

Trousers! Gandalf was awful. It was not done, not by women, not by what Bella knew women to be. It was improper, it was embarassing, and it was incredibly...not good, for Bella to contemplate. Gandalf was simply not thinking it through. If he had, he would have realized that certain practical points of anatomy made it rather necessary for Bella to wear skirts, and thus hide such inconsistencies in the tapestry of her womanhood via voluminous obfuscation. If Gandalf had thought further, he might have realized she had quite unpleasant associations with trousers as a whole and their associated masculinity.

 

No trousers.

 

_None._

 

\--*--

That night, as Bella fell off Myrtle with less grace and more the inevitability of gravity, she found that Gandalf had been correct, albeit not at all in the right way.

 

Bella did not need trousers; she did, however, need some sort of protection from the pure agony that was the inside of her legs. The bare cotton of her drawers had kept her skin from direct contact with the unholy beast, but her thighs still chafed fiercely from the simplistic fibers, and they didn’t protect from the coarse, awful pinpricks of horsehair itself and the rough blanket she'd sat upon. Every muscle from her neck down ached with the effort of keeping her on her horse, and her skirts had picked up every piece of dirt Myrtle had kicked up with her hooves. She was sure that on top of her truly embarassing appearance, she looked like an absolute fool, touching the ground so reverently, but she did not care.

 

Such soil that greeted her! Good, fertile farmland richness, solid and sure. Everything would be alright, eventually, if such soil was still present in the wide world.

 

Although, Bella had not known there were farms here, so far from Bree and any other large establishment. And it was so overgrown! With great will and dignity, she stood and swept out her skirts as she looked about. It seemed there had been a farm here, in the past tense, for there was the collapsed ruin of a farmhouse a little distance away. Gandalf did not seem to like it overmuch, and was muttering rather forebodingly.

 

“I think it wiser if we moved on,” Gandalf called to Thorin, who had been ordering his dwarves about various businesses of setting up camp. “We could make for the Hidden Valley.”

 

Rivendell? Bella remembered her mother's stories of its legendary beauty, of the way Elrond had built his estate to honor the trees. She would not mind seeing that at all.

 

Thorin Oakenshield, however, did not seem as amenable, and after drawing Gandalf into the remains of the farmhouse for a heated conversation, their plans remained unchanged, and Gandalf stormed off, claiming he was the only one with sense in their Company, which was quite ridiculous. Gandalf, claiming to have sense. Bella did her best to be useful, attempting to divine what tasks were being seen to and to help, but each time she was turned away by a muttered politeness, until she found herself sitting by the fire, clutching her pack and feeling rather out of sorts.

 

Bofur sat down beside her, spreading his legs hither and thither and looking particularly unbothered by the state of the universe. “You seem a bit preoccupied, Miss Baggins.”

 

Bella held her pack tighter, and attempted to smile in a sociable way. “I would say I’m rather the opposite. No one will let me help; I’m quite unaccustomed to it.”

 

Bofur chuckled. “Aye, you seem the type to be at loose ends without some sort of task. Look--we all mean well, we really do. It’s just that these guys don’t know you too well just yet, and they’re trying to prove themselves to Thorin as it is. To their minds it’s just easier to handle things alone, especially when they don’t know if you’re at all suited to adventuring.”

 

“That’s fair, I guess. But I was a maid, not a gentlehobbit." At least, recently. "I am used to cleaning and cooking at the very least.”

 

“Aye, Miss Baggins. The lads all like you fine, they're just used to doing things as they've done them before.”

 

Bella cocked her head. “I do hope I've come across well. I swear I'm not nearly as insane or irascible as I might seem. Running after you all is probably the most unreasonable thing I've ever done.”

 

“Oh, don't worry, Miss Baggins,” Bofur said, looking amused. “Besides, a little madness is needed, on this sort of Quest. Now if you’ll excuse me, miss, I’ll be helping my cousin prepare dinner.”

 

Bella contemplated that in the half-dark, and had to decide very hard not to be anxious about it.

 

\--*--

 

Darkness had come and settled, and Gandalf had not returned. Surely Thorin Oakenshield could not have said anything so terribly inflammatory that Gandalf would quit altogether, but Bella stood at the open end of the dilapidated farmhouse, worried. She did not overly like Gandalf, but he was one of two people who had actually talked to her, and also a wizard. It would be quite inconvenient if he didn’t return. And with nothing else to do, it was rather driving her mad, for she had nothing else to think about or do except worry that he had gotten up to some wizard-based trouble.

 

“When do you think Gandalf will return?” Bella asked Bofur.

 

Bofur shrugged. “Can’t say I know. Wizards get up to all sorts of odd business, and they don’t seem to like telling us normals overmuch about it. Now, you were looking for something to do, Miss Baggins--could you take this to the lads? They’re watching the ponies.”

 

Bella nodded and quite eagerly took the bowls of soup out of Bofur’s hands, handling them with the easy grace of long practice as she turned out of the farmhouse and picked up the slopes towards the loose clump of ponies.

 

Were Bella Baggins so crass as to lay blame in the ensuing events, she would have attributed it squarely on Fili and Kili, and in her heart she was well cross enough to be tempted to do so. But she was not so unkind, not really, and so as she found the two soups entirely forgotten and the three trolls discovered, she realized she had only herself to blame, for being fool enough to think that in the wild, losing two ponies would be as simple as them just wandering off.

 

Fili and Kili had not struck Bella as overly young at first impression, having such rough beards and well-worn armor much like the rest of their company, but as she sat between them now, attempting to understand how trolls had come into this, and which one was which (they'd said their names in unison), she began to suspect that they were either very young indeed or entirely mad. They actually suggested she try to steal back the ponies!

 

“I am not a burglar!” Bella protested. “Not yet anyway. I do not know you dwarves very well yet, Master Fili, but surely it is not custom to respond to a problem by asking a woman to fix it for you.”

 

“I’m Kili, actually,” the darker-haired of the two replied. “That would actually be our default reaction to trouble, right, Fili?”

 

“Of course!” Fili replied, attempting to lean on Bella’s shoulder, and looking more amused when she quickly shrugged him away. “And if our Mum can’t handle it, then we call in Thorin.”

 

“Then let’s get Thorin!” Bella cried. Really, were she and Bofur going to be the only rational people on this Quest?

 

That was, of course, when the two dwarves scrambled out of the way, and a large hand bodily lifted Bella into the air. She was perhaps more rational than Fili and Kili, but she had rather forgotten the practicalities of lowering one’s voice when in the vicinity of trolls.

  
“Look!” The troll holding her said, whipping her in the air in front of the other two trolls. “I found dessert!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to post this on Wednesday, but impossibly, Blooming Bellflower broke 500 hits before noon today, so the chapter comes a bit early. I'm not normally the type of person that posts in response to hits or reviews (if I was I would run out of writing very quickly, because every little thing pleases me), but I genuinely didn't think that many people would click the link, and I was looking for an excuse to post ahead of time, so here we are.
> 
> Tom Bombadil is a source of eternal amusement to me; that in the book canon there is an ageless fey creature with an ageless fey wife whose seemingly only purpose in life is to have a nice house and help out travelers is delightful to me. Why does he exist? Who made him? (Probably whoever made Beorn, if I were to guess.) Where does an immortal being get a surname like Bombadil from? The questions are endless. I also feel I should mention--the Beyond Belief episodes of the Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast have inspired me immensely in terms of dialogue, so basically, listen to Thrilling Adventure Hour if you enjoy clever dialogue. (My dialogue is probably not clever, but at least it has hopes and dreams.) Have a good night everyone!


	4. In Which Bella Is Bad At Lying, Like, Truly Mediocre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: sexism.

The dwarves, naturally, continued on their honored trend of being entirely unreasonably stupid, and came to Bella’s rescue before the trolls could actually eat her. Bella was quite glad to not be dead, but for their own sakes, the dwarves really ought to have thought out their attack. Now an assortment of dwarves were roasting on a spit over the trolls’ fire, and the rest were trussed up in sacks, like a side of beef from the butcher.

 

At least Bella had gotten the ponies free before all this mess had gotten so badly out of hand.

 

Bella flopped about in her sack. after being so embarrassingly pulled spread-eagle in front of the entire company, her legs ached more than ever, and she felt mortified at her own uselessness. She had of course not wanted to be forcibly removed from her limbs. But it seemed hardly fair, that the dwarves were now facing a quick and awful end to their Quest simply because Bella had been a bit overloud. She realized she had made quite a mistake in attempting to join them; no matter if they survived this, no matter her best efforts to be useful, she will still have been culpable for this.

 

One troll was arguing that the dwarves should be sauteed with some sage; Bella found herself thankful for him, for he at least would delay the consequences of her mistake.

 

“Never mind the seasoning,” proclaimed the largest, foulest troll, presumably their leader. (She couldn't imagine there were an other qualification categories for leader, except possibly Number of People Eaten.) “We ain’t got all night. Dawn ain’t far away, and I don’t fancy being turned to stone.”

 

Stone? That was right! In stories Bella had read, long ago in her library in Bag End, they had told of trolls, creatures foul which preyed upon the good races of Middle Earth. But so foul were they, that no good sunlight could fall upon them, for they had angered Arien the sun-keeper long ago, and if she ever beheld them she would strike them still and dead where they stood.

 

They could survive. They just needed time.

 

“Hey!” Bella cried. “You there! Sir trolls. You are making a terrible mistake.”

 

Bella hopped as best as she could in her sack, getting closer to the fire and the trolls’ hearing. (She remembered sack races many summers ago. She had always been close to last, actually.) “You are, I’m sure, familiar with cooking dwarves, but sage is simply not the way to bring a dwarf to their full flavor. Their, er, natural earthiness is so strong, sage is not nearly enough to bring them to full flavor.”

 

The lead troll loomed ominously over Bella, his face screwed up in confusion and oh, why was she doing this? “You’ve cooked dwarves?”

 

“Oh! Of course,” Bella gushed, doing her best to ignore dire mutterings from the others. “I served them all the time at the Prancing Pony. I may not seem like much, but my people are toothsome creatures, and enjoy all kinds of meat.”

 

“Nonsense!” cried the troll turning the spit. “Look at ‘er. She couldn’t eat a dwarf if she took a month to do it.”

 

“Shut up!” said the lead troll. “Let the dessert speak.”

 

“Thank you. You see, the key to cooking dwarves is…”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Is to...boil them!”

 

The dwarves cried out in dismay and Bella squeezed her eyes shut. She should have perhaps actually  _thought of something good to say_ before she dashed into her plan to save everyone. (She was not like the dwarves in this. She was not.)

 

“We don’t have a pot,” the one at the spit muttered. “See, I told you we’d need a pot. But no, it’s not necessary. Too much effort to haul around, you said. Although that’s rubbish. They’re _much_ better sauteed.”

 

“Well--that’s good!” Bella cried, spying a flash of grey on the cliff the rose behind the trolls. “You not having a pot. Because, because you can’t eat these dwarves anyway. They’re very nasty. They’ve got rot in them.”

 

“Rot!” The third troll kicked Bofur’s cousin. “Eww! I can't eat it if it's got rot!”

 

“Yes!” cried Bella, smiling and nodding. “They’re nasty things. Their teeth are falling out of their mouths, their...their eyes out of their sockets! It’s rather unsavory to be honest, you can see why I haven't eaten them myself.”

 

“What!” Kili yelled. “I brush my teeth every day just like Mum--”

 

There was a thump behind Bella, and then Kili cried, “Oh, my rot! It burns!”

 

The lead troll, unfortunately, did not look swayed. “What do you want me to do, then? Let them go?”

 

“Well. That would be--”

 

“Stupid. You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I don’t know what you’re up to? You’re a strumpet playing us a line, you are.”

 

“Strumpet!” Bella cried.

 

“Let the dawn take you all!” Gandalf boomed, from atop the rocks.

 

And that was the trolls sorted.

 

\--*--

 

Bella did not realize she had actually managed to miss a night’s sleep until she was standing outside the caves, keeping a rather stricter eye on the ponies than Fili and Kili had maintained. It hit her quite acutely, and she realized they were almost certainly not going to take a moment for a nap.

 

It would be good to get away from the trolls, but she did not at all like the prospect of attempting to keep her seat on Myrtle with sorely aching legs, and no sleep besides.

 

“Bella,” Gandalf said, emerging from the troll-hoard and thrusting a hilt in her face. “This’ll fit you quite well.”

 

“Gandalf, is that a sword? You can’t truly mean for me to carry that.” Bella frowned at Gandalf’s entirely serious demeanor. “Gandalf, I have never touched a weapon in my life, much less used one.”

 

“I hope you never have to, miss Baggins,” Gandalf said, for a moment looking very much older. “But you cannot deny that the appearance of a weapon might be more useful than walking around with nothing but your skirts to defend you. And it is of elvish make; the blade will glow blue when orcs or goblins are near. That is not a usefulness that should be taken lightly.”

 

“I suppose so.” Bella took it, tentatively weighing it in her hands. Fortunately it did not seem miserably heavy. “I shall try not to hurt anyone with my clumsiness.”

 

“I expect you will become accustomed to it quicker than you surmise. But if you do ever use it for its purpose, remember this: Courage can be marked by knowing when to spare a life, rather than end it.”

 

“You say that as if I could ever kill anyone.” Bella rubbed at her wrists, self-conscious at the contradiction that sat on her skin. “I will take the sword, Gandalf, but you presume much to think I’ll ever put hilt to hand.”

 

Bella looked down at the sword, trying to see how it was meant to affix to anything, as Gandalf wandered off. The ties were meant to be affixed to a belt, she supposed, but she certainly did not have one of those. She supposed her backpack would have to do. Quickly, as everyone else was gathering their things and talking of mounting their ponies, Bella swept off her backpack and knotted the ties of the sword around the left strap of her backpack, and stuck the end into the loose pocket whose buckle had broken off long ago. The effect, when she put her backpack back on, was that it was wedged somewhat uncomfortably against her left armpit. It would have to do, unfortunately.

 

“Something’s coming!” Bella thought it was Thorin who called the alarm, but she was unsure, as all the dwarves jumped up and scattered around her, each drawing their weapons as they did. The ensuing “Arm yourselves!” seemed hardly necessary.

 

Bella reached for her new little sword, but realized with it on her back, she could only just reach the pommel, and the function of her arm did not allow her to actually draw it. Fumbling, her heart beating hard, she flung her backpack off and just barely managed to pull the sword out of its sheath--

  
When _rabbits_ burst forth from the bushes. Pulling a _sled._

“Thieves! Fire! Murder!” proclaimed the madman on the sled, and Gandalf put his sword away.

 

“Stay your arms,” Gandalf commanded, with a pointed look at the very big tattooed dwarf. “This is Radagast the Brown. He is a member of my order. Although I do not know what he is doing here.”

 

“I was looking for you, Gandalf,” Radagast replied, as if it was a simple thing, to find a powerful wizard when he was on an ostensibly secret quest. “Something is wrong. Very, very wrong.”

 

“Yes?” Gandalf replied, with rather the look Bella imagined she did when drunk patrons asked her for a favor.

 

Radagast promptly forgot what he was going to say, and then pulled a bug out of his mouth. Bella realized she had been rather unfair to Gandalf, presuming he was mad. For being an ageless warrior for goodness, she supposed, he was holding up rather well, if Radagast was any indication of what wizards in the general were like.

 

The wizards wandered off to discuss their wizard business. Bella was left standing with a bemused set of dwarves, a useless sword in her hands. Roughly, she shoved it back in its sheath, feeling rather embarrassed, even if the others had found their weapons equally useless.

 

“Oho! I didn't know you'd found herself a pig-sticker, Miss Baggins,” Bofur said. He had the dwarf with the star-shaped hairdo at his side, who didn’t seem to have any weapon in his hands to put away, which seemed more frightening than Bofur's overlarge axe. (She wondered if his hairdo hid weapons. That seemed a dwarvish thing to do.)

 

“Gandalf found it for me in the troll-hoard,” Bella told him. “He seems to think I can deter people just by having it, although I don’t plan on using it.”

 

“Gandalf’s right enough,” Bofur mused. “But the way we’re going you might find a sword in your hand a necessity.”

 

“That’s another thing,” Bella said. “Where exactly are we going?”

 

“Oh I forgot!” Bofur looked genuinely embarrassed. “You never got the rundown on what it is we’re doing, traipsing about like this.”

 

“Not really. The contract mentioned...incineration?”

 

“Aye, that’d be on account of the dragon Smaug. Terrible beastie, greatest calamity of our Age by most reckonings. We’re to drive him out of Erebor and reclaim the kingdom for our own, or to be more precise, for Thorin's own on the mountain and a certain amount of gold and for our own, equal shares of said gold.”

 

“A _dragon?_ ” Bella had not signed on for this! Well, she had, but that seemed rather out of the scope of what could be expected. She was certain she needed to sit down.

 

A howl echoed through the woods, dark and terrible, and Bofur clutched his axe to his chest.

 

“That’s no wolf.”

 

\--*--

 

Running away from wargs and orcs was about as unpleasant as it could be thought to be, if Bella had ever thought herself fool enough to end up in such a predicament. Bella’s heart hammered as she did her best to keep pace with the dwarves. With her skirts hiked up to her knees and her backpack beating a savage rhythm into her spine, she found she could barely match Bofur’s lumbering cousin, which did not raise her estimation of her own survival.

 

Bella felt certain she was about to be eaten by a warg at any moment, which made her feel foolish for going to all that length in order to not be eaten by trolls. Of course neither was preferable, but if she hadn’t bothered, her lungs would not be burning so, and she would not be feeling her resolve to live slip away. It was not a wholly unfamiliar feeling, but she found it unwelcome any time it came to her door, and with the addition of having to desperately dash after all these dwarves she found it unbearable.

 

But still, she ran. One step, then another, doing what little she could to slow her inevitable slide into collapse and warg food. She would not choose to give up. She would not.

 

Gandalf’s path across the plains led them to shelter under a rock, and Bella nearly cried, clutching the stone behind her as her feet rooted themselves into the ground as best they could.

 

“Oh sweet Yavanna,” she muttered. “Give me the strength of your land, and if you can’t spare me that, then grant me a quick death, if you please.”

 

Thorin shot her a look that made her throat close, then turned to Kili at his side, giving some sort of nod that was apparently a command. Kili stepped out from shelter. He shot some arrows, a warg and its rider fell down out of nowhere, and then they were running again, now with swords and axes stained with black bile.

 

Bella pretended as she fled that Yavanna had granted her her prayer, and put extra strength into each footstep, pushed herself forward with more determination. She could not last long like this, but she chose to pretend she would not have to, because she could not anyway.

 

Of course, all that running became summarily useless, and for all that they managed to leave the rougher plains for grasses and short pines, they became surrounded. Gandalf disappeared before any could mark him. Bella felt rather a panic, but then there was Gandalf and a tunnel, and pounding hoofbeats above.

  
“Elves,” Thorin snarled, bending over an arrow coming out of the throat of an orc corpse, and Bella thought she could cry with happiness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's another chapter! Up until about an hour ago this was chapters four and five, respectively, but it works miles better together. And we see the start of Cindy sprinkling in movie dialogue or close versions of it. I'm doing my best to be sparing with such things but The Hobbit is not a travesty of a film franchise so sometimes the dialogue used is simply the best way about it. Since I'm watching for reference as I go along I'm a bit more strict to the script in my initial drafts; hopefully most of it is edited out for the sake of providing you all with something new.
> 
> Hope you all enjoy.


	5. In Which Bella Contemplates Art

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: main character feeling useless.

The dwarves were muttering awful things, but Bella was not sure she had seen a home more beautiful in all her life than Rivendell as they walked down the sheer steps toward the Valley. Such trees! The Shire of course had beautiful, strong trees, but these were trees beyond age, finely twisted, with thick trunks and tall, spindly branches beyond number. She could see how the waterfalls had lent strength and true iron to their very roots, the way the trees had become only stronger over time, holding together the base upon which Rivendell stood when time and water would have made it crumble away. Yavanna had done her work well in forming this valley, and the elves had honored it; the House was to Bella’s eyes a clear homage to the beauty of the sacred trees, made to harmonize with them rather than detract as so many of the buildings of Men did. It felt nearly like coming home, to see a place so at peace with nature. Her mother had not lied about its wonders.

 

“Ugh,” the tattooed dwarf muttered. “Just lookin’ at it makes me go blind.”

 

Bella shook her head and wondered if dwarves had any concept of beauty at all if they could not see the splendor before them. Although, she begrudgingly credited, they exclaimed the name of Aule in their oaths, not Yavanna; perhaps their notion of beauty was different, and somehow did not involve trees.

 

Bella could not imagine it, but she was willing to be charitable.

 

Thorin and Gandalf, of course, got into an argument, which Bella thought rather unfair because Gandalf had actually been useful. Bella did not know much about this region of Middle Earth but since orcs and trolls prowled it she wondered whether there had been anywhere else they could have sought refuge, with the ponies taking off with most of their provisions. Gandalf was for once speaking practically, and Bella was surprised to see Thorin give in. He had seemed incensed enough with elves as a whole that she found herself once more favoring him over Gandalf simply because he seemed much more capable of bending to another’s point of view. (It had not escaped Bella’s attention that Gandalf had wanted to go to Rivendell, and that their flight had forced them there. It was the right choice, but the fact that Gandalf had tricked the dwarves into it did not sit well.)

 

An elf named Lindir greeted them at the exit of the bridge that had been rather too sheer for Bella’s liking. He spoke half in Elvish but Bella got the distinct impression that he was attempting something Bella liked to call “not-at-homing.” Bella had done it when she had occupied Bag End, hiding in corners and staying quiet when others came to call; while a place as large as Rivendell could not pretend to be unoccupied, the elf asserted that Elrond was out and seemed about to say that Elrond would not be there for weeks, so if you would please come back later, when a horn call resounded through the valley.

 

Elrond rode at the head of a company of men, directing their horses over the sheer bridge (did he not worry if they misstepped? it seemed a horrible pity to fall to one’s and one’s horse’s death for the sake of architectural delicacy) and surrounding the Company with a wall of horseflesh. Elrond looked down at them, regal and with an expression of wisdom beyond age, but he faltered when he looked at Bella, who had been shoved into the middle of the crowd of dwarves.

 

“Belladonna?” he asked, and he stilled his horse, leaning forward in the saddle. “But you look…”

 

Bella pulled at her dress, self-conscious of the way the dwarf eyes fell on her. “I am Bella. Belladonna was my mother.”

 

“Was.”

 

“Yes,” Bella said, and felt a rush of sadness at the surprise on Elrond’s own face. “She Faded, a few years ago, after my father succumbed to the Fell Winter. I tried to send word to you, but I suppose it never got here. She herself had wanted to visit you in her last days, but…the Fading came on too quick, in the end, for her to travel so far.”

 

Elrond shook his head, and dismounted. “I did not even know Belladonna had a daughter. I had heard only of Bilbo.”

 

“I...yes.” Bella blushed, and was never gladder that her skin did not show blushes well. “She once had a son. But I am her daughter.”

 

Elrond, fortunately, seemed to accept that at face value. “Well then you are welcome in our halls, with your companions.”

 

“Thank you,” Bella told him, entirely genuinely. “We have seen much in a very short amount of time, and rest would not be amiss.”

 

Gandalf harrumphed; he seemed to feel he had been rather left out. He said something in Elvish, and Elrond walked over to him, attention fully diverted.

 

Thorin appeared at Bella’s side, seemingly caught between being disgruntled and surprised. “I was of the impression that hobbits are insular folk.”

 

“Oh, they are,” Bella told him. “To a fault, really. But my mother was a Took, and she talked too much to Gandalf to be healthy, it was said. She came to Rivendell several times as a young girl, and I believe she was named Elf-Friend.”

 

“So your...brother, was the one Gandalf originally sought. Bilbo Baggins.”

 

“Yes.” It was as good a lie as any; Bella looked over at Gandalf, and he gave a small nod. Bella hoped that that meant that he would corroborate that version of events. “But he died soon after my parents. I am all that's left of the Baggins.”

 

Well technically she wasn't a Baggins, anymore, of being cast out, but Bella preferred not to think of that.

 

Elrond turned his attention to the Company then, and Thorin stepped forward. She wondered if it was part of being a leader, to make sure you were the first to be seen and introduced, or if in some instinctual part of Thorin he was trying to shield the Company from the elves by placing himself first.

 

“Welcome, Thorin, son of Thrain,” Elrond said.

 

“I do not believe we have met.” Bella supposed that was close enough to politeness to pass for it.

 

“You remind me of your grandfather, as young Bella reminded me of Belladonna,” he said. “I knew Thror when he ruled under the mountain.”

 

“Now I know why I recall that face,” a gray-haired dwarf muttered.

 

Bella was confused. His grandfather had ruled a mountain? Did that mean Thorin was a prince, or even a king? What was he doing rambling about the wilderness, with only twelve dwarves, a hobbit, and a mad old thing like Gandalf following after him? Oughtn't he have armies?

 

“He did not mention you,” Thorin said. Elrond replied in Elvish.

 

“Does he offer us insult?!” cried the red haired dwarf who was not Bofur’s cousin. (She really needed Gandalf or Bofur to tell her everyone’s names, this was getting out of hand quickly.)

 

Gandalf sighed. “He offers you food.”

 

 

\--*--

 

After the business with the trolls, and the orcs, and the very sheer bridge into Rivendell and finally the lovely meal and gorgeous vistas, Bella had thought she would be able to sleep.

 

She could not.

 

She did not think it was the room she had been provided, although it was disconcertingly well-appointed for a guest’s quarters; she had been fed and finally gotten to bathe (after dinner, it should be noted, which really showed that Elrond was more of a man than he led on), so her physical comforts were very well met. She had even prayed to Yavanna before climbing into bed, which was something she usually found not worth fussing over, but she had to thank Yavanna for the glory of this valley.

 

It was quite ridiculous. She had spent an entire night the plaything of trolls, a morning tramping around looking for a cave, and the height of a day running from wargs. She had had many more frights than were due any hobbit, she ought to be able to sleep!

 

In the absence of rest, Bella found she could not stay still at all, and after a bit of rummaging in the closet she found a soft green robe that she was able to tie so that the fabric lay high on her neck. That done, she eased her door open and stepped out into the night. Rivendell looked well in the moonlight; the pale spires blended with crisp moonlight, until Bella found she could not tell what was light and what was building. She was so distracted she rather forgot to keep track of her way, and she found herself wandering a hallway where paintings were interspersed along the walls, great, wide works depicting battles and the creation of Middle Earth. There was one of the creation of the elves that was especially beautiful. There was also one of the creation of the dwarves, though all the dwarves in it looked more like Marjorie Cotton than the Company; she suspected it had been done without proper reference. (There was not one of the creation of the hobbits, which was fine, since it was a secret anyway.)

 

Up a flight of stairs, Bella found a statue, robed and solemn, arms around a plinth that held the shattered remains of a sword. The statue’s eyes looked across the hall, to a large painting Bella could not make out in the moonlight; only that a very large, dark figure stood over another, his sword held high in preparation to strike, with some sort of ring glittering even in the dark on his raised hand.

 

Bella heard heave footsteps and ducked behind the statue. She could very well have strayed into someplace off limits in her bemusement, and it wouldn't do to make the Company look but with her sleepless foolishness.

 

“Blast it,” said the figure on the lower level. “This place is a nightmare of terraces.”

 

Bella sneaked a look between the rungs of the bannister. It was Thorin, and he looked quite lost (although he was not in pajamas, which she felt put him a bit ahead in the unpreparedness department).

 

“I cannot--I was told she was this way, but these do not look like living quarters.” It was quite a bit endearing that Thorin apparently talked to himself when he was alone. He spoke so little in the presence of others Bella would have thought all his thoughts were under lock and key.

 

Bella could not think of a "she" Thorin might be looking for besides herself, so she spoke up. “I know; I am quite befuddled myself by these halls. This place seems to be some sort of museum.”

 

Thorin squinted upwards. “Miss Baggins?”

 

“Yes, Master Oakenshield, it is me. One moment.” Bella patted her robe to ensure it still preserved her modesty and quickly descended the stairs. Thorin stood, in full armor and even his grand fur coat, at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her. For a moment she fancied he was a prince--well, he already was, apparently, but he was the real type of prince, that one day ruled a country. The prince Bella saw for a moment was the type from children’s stories, who grappled with curses and dances, who took helpless country maidens by the hand and transformed them into their princesses.

 

Bella was not a princess, but Thorin was very princely, and Bella blushed to have noted it.

 

“Miss Baggins,” Thorin said, bowing slightly at the waist. “I was looking for you; you are needed with the Company.”

 

“I am needed?” Bella was surprised, and did not attempt to hide it. “Then it is fortunate we found ourselves lost in the same place.”

 

Thorin looked crestfallen. “You are lost as well.”

 

“A bit,” Bella admitted. “Although I think I have a notion of how to retrace my steps.”

 

Bella walked down the hallway to the left and Thorin walked by her side. He peered at the walls around them as if he had seen none of them before.

 

“So! What is it that the Company requires of me?”

 

“We did not know where you had gone after Elrond read the moon runes, and we must gather ourselves and our provisions,” Thorin told her. “Gandalf came and told us Saruman the White has appeared, and would seek to halt us on our Quest. We must away before dawn, so we may be out of the Valley before any think to look for us.”

 

“Oh.” It was not as good as thinking she might actually be useful for something or other, being needed so she could be accounted for and then mustered out onto the road again. It sounded like she would not be going back to bed that night, too. At least she had been unable to sleep to begin with. “I am sorry, I did not think to notify you all! I went back to the room the elves lent me after the rune business, although I did not stay long.”

 

“We were allowed berth on a veranda. You were given a room?”

 

A veranda? Bella suspected that Lindir had done that to them, he seemed the type for such deviousness. “Yes, I got a room. I think it was where my mother stayed, when she visited. Everything is properly sized in it.”

 

Thorin nodded, looking rather disgruntled on his Company's behalf, and was quiet again.

 

Bella came to an intersection with another hallway and turned to her left, hoping her uncertainty was not betrayed across her face. Thorin’s own face betrayed nothing, snd in retrospect, Bella did not know how she had not suspected him of nobility; even in what little illumination the moonlight provided to his particular features, he had a grand bearing that was not nearly so obnoxious as one who is simply rich. It was a little obnoxious, for it told of stubbornness and pride beyond measure, but it also spoke of fair things, like refined manners and knowing the difference between five types of fork. Bella found it very nearly pleasing.

 

“The dwarf that came with us to look at the moon runes,” Bella said. “You seemed very close. Who is he?”

 

“He is Balin. He has been my advisor in many things for as long as can be properly recalled.” Thorin looked long at her. “I would have thought he would have introduced himself to you sooner.”

 

“We have had quite a trial of it recently,” Bella pointed out. “Bofur managed to introduce himself, and Fili and Kili impressed their names upon me in the heat of the moment, but it is no surprise the rest of you have had no time for niceties. I had hoped to become acquainted with everyone’s name soon enough, but I hope I will be forgiven if it takes me a little while. There are quite so many of you.”

 

“You have forgotten that I introduced myself.” Thorin looked smug.

 

“No, you were introduced to me, it is rather different. We have a saying in the Shire--‘introducing oneself ripens the fruit.’ Oh, I suppose that doesn’t make sense at all out of context. But the basic meaning is that there is a difference between knowing someone’s name and having a relationship with them. Since Bofur introduced himself, with proper leisure and an attempt at conversation, I have had a chance to feel I know him a little, to have an impression of who he is. Your name I know, Master Oakenshield, but yourself I do not.”

 

“We are having a conversation now.” She was not sure if Thorin had entirely followed the conversation, but he was smiling, so he was at least amused. “Therefore I have...introduced myself. You know me.”

 

“Yes, and I had to start that conversation myself, didn’t I?” Bella knew she was being entirely too witty for someone in a nightgown and thick robe (with their arms crossed to hide the lack of any particularly feminine features of the chest). “You have comported yourself well, so I admit I feel I am now familiar with you, but it is entirely my doing. I do not mind it, but let us put credit where it is due.”

 

Thorin nodded the point to her. “How may I ‘introduce’ myself to you in the truly proper way, then? What may I say that would make myself or my Company better acquainted with you?”

 

“You may tell me why I am on this Quest.” Bella sounded foolish putting it like that; she tried again. “I only mean, I seem very unsuited to the position, and until that awful Marjorie Cotton showed up you did not seem overly warm to Gandalf’s meddling. So why did you help me onto Myrtle’s back? Why am I here?”

 

Thorin was silent for again, and Bella thought that perhaps she had been too impertinent; they passed through enough shadows that she could not be sure of his expression. Eventually he said, “It was unfair of me to judge you when Gandalf had vouched for you. I was more annoyed at Gandalf himself for not discussing his plans with me, nor with you, it seems. I will not say whether or not you are best suited for our trials to come, for I do not know. It is a point of wisdom often repeated by dwarves that one’s skill cannot be divined from appearance. But most of all, it does not sit well with any dwarf to see someone attacked so viciously as you were, and without provocation. Any dwarf would side with you in that moment, and so I found myself willing to overlook Gandalf’s meddling for your own sake.”

 

Pity, then. It was straightforward enough, but it still burned Bella, inside her heart and unfortunately, in her eyes. She turned away from Thorin to survey where they were; she thought they might have nearly found her quarters again. “Thank you for your honesty. I will try to be useful.”

 

“And I will attempt to be better known to you. I will make sure all the Company will,” Thorin said, sounding completely sincere and princely.

 

Bella felt it like a physical weight upon her chest, his formality. His noble intentions, entirely wasted on someone whose crimes had yet to come to light.

 

Bella and Thorin walked in silence as Bella’s gut twisted, and then blessedly they turned a corner and her quarters were in sight. She knew they must be them, for Balin stood in front of them and looked at Thorin with exasperation.

 

“I thought you might be lost,” Balin said to his leader. “At least you found Miss Baggins in the process. Elsewise we might have spent all night looking for both of you.”

 

“I was equally lost, so it was more fortunate that the way back appeared before us. I will get my things and prepare myself for our departure. Master Balin, Master Oakenshield.” Bella curtsied at both men and slipped into her room before her embarrassment could overwhelm her in front of them.

  
She sank to the floor, her face in her hands. She was entirely useless, and she had the sinking feeling that the prospect of being useful was slipping further out of her fumbling fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if you can tell, but Bella's criticism of bridges and other sheer places without railings is going to be a thing. Mostly because I myself am terrified of sheer drops without railings. I don't trust myself enough to not trip and fall headlong down, even though that's never actually happened. Bella's not exactly graceful so I imagine she'd have the same concerns.
> 
> I've never been the type to write ahead, so I'm actually finding it quite useful, this first time that I'm doing it. I get to have good ideas late into the thing and go back and add them into all the other chapters.
> 
> EDIT: WOW I forgot to write out the chapter title fully, I'm a dingbat. Anyway, here is the stuff.


	6. In Which Bella Finds Herself Unsatisfactory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: discomfort with physical touch, extremely low self-esteem related to being trans and black, mentions of persecution, tears.

Rivendell slipped behind them in the dawnlight. They had set out a bit later than intended, but Gandalf had promised to delay any pursuit, and they thought they might yet avoid the contention of Saruman the White. So the beautiful valley dropped steadily behind them as they rose into the surrounding rock face.

  


Bella had managed a light doze when all the dwarves were gathered on the veranda, but she had not truly slept, and as she turned for one last look at the Last Homely House, she found her mood more than a measure bitter. If this was to be the outlook of the Quest, she was not certain she would sleep at all. It of course didn’t seem to affect the dwarves or Thorin overmuch, but they were hardy folk, of course. Perhaps they had never slept in their lives. Perhaps they went years without sleeping.

  


“Miss Baggins,” Thorin called, from further up where he was directing the Company to shuffle behind Balin into some sort of gods-cursed crevasse, why must there always be sheer drops involved in this Quest? “I suggest you join us.”

  


Bella scowled (and blushed but really that was _not_ relevant) and ducked back into the flow of dwarves. It would not be said of her that she lagged behind.

  


Gandalf was still in Rivendell. He was probably sleeping, even. Well good for him, the blasted, terrible meddler. Bella would have some choice words with him about not meddling them up a couple of hours’ sleep in his little schemes.

  


Bella stumbled, and the dwarf behind her caught her, muttering in a grumbling tongue she did not understand, and she returned her eyes to her feet. It hardly mattered if she felt tired or foul-mannered. She could not hold the Company up. She could not fall behind.

  


She would not be useless.

  


\--*--

  


Bella managed well enough for the hours where they crossed open plains, but it was another matter altogether when they were attempting to inch along a cliff face even more sheer than Elrond’s blasted bridge, with pounding rain coming down on top of them. By the time Bella nearly fell into the abyss, stone crumbling beneath her toes, every party of the Company looked as miserable as she had felt since leaving the Hidden Valley.

  


“We must find shelter!” Thorin cried, his eyes scanning the horizon. Shelter! Shelter was good. If only Bella could spy--

  


A rock crashed into the cliff face above them, entirely too massive to have been kicked up by the wind, and they all sheltered from the debris. Bella giddily thought that perhaps the gods meant to build them a shelter where they stood, but the true answer came soon enough.

  


“Stone giants!”

  


They were marvels, even to Bella’s blurred powers of perception. Great, hulking beings of rock, with no discernable reason for their limbs to connect and have motion. Yet they did, tearing out pieces of the mountain and hurling them through space as if it were nothing. Bella clung desperately to the rock face and her reason, and she was fortunate she did so, for the very rock they stood on twisted and plunged, and she found herself on the knee of a stone giant with half the company, the other half on its other knee. Bella would have been certain that she had fallen into dreamland, except every part of her ached with the reality.

  


The other half of the Company rode their knee to freedom, but Bella’s half, trapped closer to where they had come from and not where they needed to go, found themselves wavering in the wind. An entire stone giant’s head crashed into their own stone giant, and even it reeled from the blow, crashing knees first into the cliff face. Bella found herself clinging not to the giant but to the real, proper cliff face again, still alive, against all reason.

  


She was so relieved that for a moment it quite escaped her notice that she was dangling many thousands of feet above certain death, and the path was in fact above her, so she was not so safe at all.

  


“Where’s the hobbit? Where’s Bella?” Bofur cried.

  


Bella wiggled, the rock cutting deep into her palms, and she felt grateful for the many arms that came down to grab at her, but she realized it was hopeless. Even if she grabbed their hands she was not nearly strong enough to haul herself up onto the ledge, even at her most rested state. She was actually, really, truly going to die this time.

  


There was a pull at her backpack, and she found herself rising into the arms of the Company quite beyond her own power. She looked back to see Thorin dangling from the cliff face, even more precariously than she had. With help, he managed to ascend the cliff face once more. Breathing hard, Thorin and Bella faced each other.

  


Thorin said nothing, but she could see it in his face. She should never have come.

  


\--*--

  


Of course, once again, when Bella could have slept, she didn’t. She rested, in that she laid down and pulled her blanket over her head, but crying silently was an entirely different thing from sleeping. She was sure even with the tears that she might have dropped dead away the moment she had found herself sideways, but she was well acquainted with the boiling pitch that was churning in her stomach, and she knew it would not allow peace.

  


Bella did not find herself a graceful, beautiful, fair, or even good creature. She knew well in her heart that she was clumsy, ugly, too dark-skinned to seem truly fair of feature, and her sins had been enumerated well enough in the Shire that the list was burned onto her heart. Lechery. Debauchery. Pretense and Seduction. Unnatural inclinations. She had in the past at least been at terms with that list, known it to be true but also known that she was a useful creature, that above all things she burdened no one else overmuch with her existence. That, it seemed, was no longer true, and Bella did not like it very much.

  


Clumsy. Ugly. Sinful. Useless. The words pounded into her back, heart, stomach and mind as if the axes of her own Company were bent towards her. She flung back the blanket, and quietly as could be managed, she gathered her backpack and tiptoed her way towards the door.

  


“Where are you going?” Bofur’s whisper cut in behind her, and Bella’s spine ran up and down with dread. Of course she couldn’t even sneak away without being caught.

  


Bella turned to him. He sat, wide awake, looking at her with genuine confusion.

  


“Rivendell, maybe? Or perhaps Bree, I haven’t decided which would be best,” Bella told him. She hoped Elrond might host her again in memory of her mother, at least long enough for her to collapse upon a bed and decide what to do next.

  


Bofur did not seem best pleased with that response. He jumped up, quick to lay a hand on her shoulder. Fortunately, he did not seem upset when she shrugged it away. “No, no, you can’t go back to the elves! Or that awful town. You’ve come so far! You’re one of us now.”

  


“Am I, Bofur?” Bella did not cling to the edges of her control; her tears flowed freely. She would only know him for a minute or two longer, so she found she did not care if he saw her cry. It would not matter, for she would not see him ever again; she need not be polite or commodious. “I should never have come with you all. No one will actually say it, but I am no asset to you all. I can barely ride a pony without aching, walking has exhausted me beyond measure, and I cannot keep on at such a pace. I see spots in my eyes from exhaustion yet I cannot sleep. I am not a burglar, nor a warrior, nor anyone who should have strayed five miles from Bree. I do not wish to get you all killed by my foolishness, and you all have a kingdom to retake. That is too important for me to ruin.”

  


“Bella…” Bofur did not seem to know a proper response for a long moment. “You are a good soul, Bella. That is something any dwarf would be proud to have in a companion, skills notwithstanding. You have done so much! You saved us from the trolls--Elrond! Elrond would probably have turned us out on our ear if not for your connections, dirty things that we are. You are one of us, Bella. We should miss you if you were gone.”

  


“I know you would, Bofur. You are a kind soul and that is much to your credit.” Bella shook her head. “But I am a burden and let us not make nice of it. I am leaving and I will not let you be so foolish as to convince me to stay.”

  


Bofur shook his head. “I disagree with much that you have said here. But I see that I cannot dissuade you, so I will only say that you will be remembered by us, wherever you go.”

  


Bofur hugged her then. Bella stiffened at it, but she realized it was...okay, if not exactly comfortable, coming from Bofur. He meant nothing by it except to express his goodwill, so it was okay. Sort of.

  


She pulled away quickly nonetheless. “Th-thank you, Bofur. Goodbye.”

  


Bella turned towards the cave mouth, and she heard Bofur inhale behind her.

  


“Bella, your sword…”

  


“Hm?” What did her sword have to do with anything? Bella craned her head and hand back. She just barely managed to get her fingertips onto the pommel of the sword, and pull it out a fraction of an inch.

  


The blade glowed blue.

  


“Wake up!” cried Thorin, and he rose from where he had lain, staring at her sword. Enough of Bella’s mind was diverted from the thought of orcs and goblins orcs and goblins to be absolutely mortified that he might have heard any part of their conversation.

  
And then the world fell away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: I edited this while drinking Mike's Hard and I am a lightweight. So. Loopy funtimes for CI! Unrelated yet sort of related: CI has just ended a long-term relationship. So updates are going down to once a week until CI is far enough away from her own heart troubles to write about Bella and Thorin.


	7. In Which Bella Does Not Riddle In The Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: sexual harassment, threat of mastication, a ring mind-talking people into stuff, character comparing themselves to Gollum.

Sliding down sheer rock faces was especially unenjoyable when one was trying to hold one’s skirts closed, and Bella gasped as she landed on at least two dwarves on her back. She could feel cuts all over her body, particularly a long, lean slash that burned through her eyebrow where she’d impacted a slope with her face. She didn’t even have a moment to breathe before cold, hard hands grabbed at her, and she found herself on her feet and shuffled along after the Company, unnumbered goblins plucking at her hair and skirts.

 

“Pretty thing,” one hissed in her ear, its foul breath reeking. “The king will like the pretty thing.”

 

Bella bat the thing’s hands away from her waist with a hiss and then tripped over her own toes, falling to the ground. To her surprise, goblins and dwarves alike tramped over and past her, and she looked up to see the entire assembly walking away.

 

Bella jumped to hide behind a stone. She was very, very afraid, and very, very without options. This was better than being pulled at by goblins to some unknown place, but she was still in a goblin-ridden cave who knew how deeply inside a mountain, without a lick of practical defense ability. She reached, desperately, for the pommel of her sword, but stopped with a hiss as her arm got halfway and refused to continue. Oh, she was in big, big trouble.

 

Carefully easing her backpack off, Bella unsheathed her sword properly, holding it in her less sore left hand. Backpack returned to her back (straps pulled tight, so tight, she would not let it slip away from her in a place so godforsaken), Bella creeped out along the bridge, seeing if she could keep track of where the Company was being taken.

 

A goblin, tiny and rank, dropped in front of her. He wasn’t even half as big as she was, but she felt her heart bang at her chest nonetheless, her sword wavering to face frontward.

 

“Pretty thing,” the goblin snarled. “I will have pretty thing. Pretty thing is mine.”

 

Bella fought off its sword, and then its long, grasping fingers, searching to grab at her hair, at the neckline of her dress. She could not, however, fight off being pulled backwards by gravity, and once again she went tumbling into the dark.

 

At the bottom of this newest hole, Bella groaned, looking at her sword glow in the dark some distance away. At least she hadn't stabbed herself with it in her fall.

 

The goblin lay across from her, and she watched, horrified, as it was knocked about and dragged off by a graying, emaciated creature. (She was not sure it was a goblin. It looked quite a lot like a goblin, but it had large, fishlike eyes, pointed ears, and rather less of the skin conditions that seemed endemic to goblinism. Perhaps a subspecies?) To Bella's surprise, since all the creature wore was a loincloth, a ring dropped from its person, bouncing to land very near her hiding place as the creature dragged its captive away.

 

The ring looked strange, and she had to wonder why a wasted creature that was--well, it was probably eating the goblin, wasn't it--was doing with a bright gold ring. It hardly seemed important, to keep something like that if goblinmeat and loincloths were a fact of life (although wrapped up in a cloth in the very bottom of her pack were her parents’ wedding rings, and Bella knew she made do with rather less than most hobbits deemed necessary). Bell picked up the ring and stowed it away in the small pocket of her skirt. **Perhaps it could be useful, later.**

 

Bella followed after the fish-creature, as it was the only way to go, and as she crept towards a large, noiseless lake in a dark chamber she could barely see the limits of, she heard the creature singing a very familiar song.

 

“The cold hard lands they bites our hands, they gnaws our feeeeeeet…” crooned Gollum, bending over his goblin prize. It was a bit diluted, but it was an old hobbit song, older than hobbits themselves, it was said, about winter. The creature must have once been a hobbit, at some point in its life! No other creature, Gandalf excepted, was well enough acquainted with the Shire to know their songs for winter, the tunes that were crooned only to children in the long night hours when spring was so far away. She could not countenance what would transform a hobbit into something so awful, and it made her feel ill, even as the light of her blade flickered out.

 

The creature jumped in front of her then, of course. Bella was beginning to realize having a glowing blade had a rather conspicuous downside.

 

“Bless us and splash us, precious,” hissed the creature, its eyes glowing like moons in the low light. “It’s a meal, and it’s even wrapped up so nice.”

 

Bella raised the sword to its chest; she did _not_ want any more hands near her. The creature coughed balefully in reaction, yet still it drew nearer.

 

“Stay back! Keep your hands to your bloody self.” At least she sounded brave.

 

The creature frowned, slinking away in a circular way that meant it didn't actually retreat any significant distance. “What is it, precious? What is it? The pretty thing that holds _Elvish_ steel.”

 

Bella frowned. “I--I am Bella Baggins. I'm a hobbit.”

 

“Baggins? Are Baggins tasty meats?”

 

“How should I know, pray? Now, you, er, sir, you do not know of Baggins and hobbits? You just sang our own song of winter.”

 

The creature coughed again. “Winters? No, No, song not about winters, song about us, precious. We bites hands and gnawses feet. We will eat yours, yes.”

 

“No you will not!” Bella did her best to hide the toes of one foot with those of another, but of course that only drew attention to them.

 

“Toes look soft. Fingers look _juicy_.”

 

Bella put her sword in its face, accidentally jabbing it in the nose. “Keep back! I will use this. I do not know what manner of creature you are, Sir Winter, but you clearly know your way about. So--so show me the way out, and you will be spared.”

 

“Is it lost?” The creature asked, quite interested.

 

“Noooooo…” Bella did not think it at all a good idea to be honest on that point. “But, you see--my eyes are not as good, in the dark. You shall scout ahead the way.”

 

“It lies, precious. It is lost.”

 

“I am a _she_ , not an _it,_  and well, yes, I’m lost." Bella found herself, surprisingly, to be more and more irritated. This creature was toying with her, acting like it had the upper hand when she was the one with the sword. "But I’ll kill you if you don’t take me out of here, so do that. Take me out of here.”

 

“How abouts a game? We likes games.”

 

“How about no!” Bella waved her sword about. “Do I look to be in a gaming mood? Show me the way out!”

 

Really, this creature thought it was so terrifying. And it was, but this was literally the third time she had been at risk for being eaten in three days. Did the creature think she was impressed by it, after trolls and wargs? She was now rather a good judge of threats towards one's person vis a vis mastication, and this was the least impressive of the lot. She had not slept, the spots in her vision were ever larger and she really did not have the _time_ to be threatened by a semi-goblin winter-creature in a loincloth, not when she could be getting out of this mountain, post haste.

 

“We do not like the she-Baggins.” the creature hacked. “Nasty, violent thing. Does it say to show the way out, precious? We will show it the way.”

 

The creature reached for its loincloth, and its huge, wet eyes widened impossibly more, with panic.

 

It was looking for the ring, Bella realized, her own panic mounting as the creature flung old bones across the cavern, its eyes tracking across the ground. It was looking for the ring like it was a weapon. And she had it.

 

“It’s lost! The precious is lost.”

 

Bella’s hand flew to her pocket, and fingered the cold metal. **She thought she should put it on.**

 

The creature turned to her then, as if touching the ring called to it somewhere in its slimy little being. “The she-Baggins has a pack. The she has pockets. What has it got in its pocketses and packses, precious?”

 

Bella raised her sword. **She thought she really should put the ring on.**

 

“The she-Baggins stole it. The she-Baggins stole it!” The creature screamed and ran at Bella, and she promptly turned and fled. She was sure it was only by pure luck that she found a crevasse in the cavern that actually led somewhere and did not abruptly end; unfortunately, it led to rather too many options, and Bella found herself turning in place, sword gripped as tightly as her failing hand could manage. **The ring. Bella needed to put on the Ring.**

 

Bella shook her head into action as the creature’s cries came ever closer. There was a crevasse just to her right, tight enough it would slow an attempt to follow. Bella slung off her pack and held it in her right hand, her arm screaming as she attempted to worm her way through the crack. Her pack, then her arm. got through, but her body only made it halfway before it tugged and stuck. The fit was so tight that the decorative ribbon lacing on her bodice had caught and snagged on the rock. She was to be undone by ribbons.

 

The creature loped towards her, increasing speed and bunching its legs to strike.

 

Bella forced herself, hard, through the crevasse, and her dress tore and she stumbled, falling flat on her back and wrenching her right arm so painfully she could not help but scream. **The ring** , the creature’s ring, **the beautiful ring** , flew out of her pocket, and she reached out with her screaming arm, to get it out from under her and to grab the ring before it could bounce away into darkness. She barely managed to hook it with one finger, and it turned and slid down her finger, which Bella would have thought rather unlike a ring to do, if the world around her hadn’t completely changed in reaction to it. Because of course the sort of ring a nasty creature would hold onto would be the  _magic_ kind.

 

The world of the ring was markedly different from the one she had perceived before, even thought it had already been a bit blurry, what with the sleep deprivation. She had thought she had been seeing a blurred and slightly removed world, but this one beat it out by miles, with every shadow flickering and every object leeched of its color. The color, and all the warmth in the air; Bella attempted to pull her ripped dress over her exposed stay and felt as if ice had been pressed against her back. She was more alert now, for certain.

 

The creature leaped through the crack onto the ground before her, and Bella swung her sword wildly at it, but its eyes slide over her. It looked around, desperate and searching, as if Bella did not occupy the space that she did, and then ran off deeper into the crevasse.

 

Was Bella invisible? How **useful. How very useful**.

 

“Thief! Baggins!” the creature hissed as it went, and it occurred to Bella that if she was indeed invisible, it could not hurt to follow after the creature. Surely at least one of the places it would look for her would be the exit.

 

So Bella followed the creature as it ran all around the darkest places of the mountain, looking for her. It investigated several nasty dead ends, and Bella became **gladder and gladder** that she had happened to pick up the ring, for she would not have liked to have died in some place so remote that only this creature would know it happened. The creature kept hacking, and she wondered what she would call him, when she would retell this tale to...somebody, probably Gandalf, he should like to hear about vile things living in mountains, that was his business after all. "Mr. Winter" was quite poetic, she thought, but she was not looking to write a ballad or an epic, and did not quite connote its vile and pathetic nature. She decided to call it Gollum; appropriate, because it sounded like a very nasty version of a hobbit name, as well as the sound of the creature’s awful coughs. It would make for quite a good story.

 

Eventually, Gollum led her to a well-lit tunnel. Was that sunlight? In this drained out half-light she could not quite tell. There was a cacophony of noise coming from the end of the tunnel, and the creature hid behind a rock. To Bella’s own shock, she watched Gandalf (now when had _he_ shown up?!) and the entire Company pass right by the crack in the rock where she stood!

 

“Come on!” Gandalf urged, and after ushering the entire Company past him he too fled. Gollum crept out of his hiding place. Bella followed. Bella stood over Gollum, and she realized she could, actually, kill him in this moment. He would never know; and whatever sort of evil he was, be it only the person-eating kind or other stripes more sinister, Middle Earth could be rid of him. No one would miss him.

 

Gollum’s face turned, in despair, to look back down the crack, and she did not pity it for that. It missed the ring, and what comfort was given to it by doing black deeds without ever being discovered, and she did not find herself unsettled by its grief. What truly unsettled her was the point of its ears, the roundness Gollum’s features would have had if he had been fed as often as hobbits were meant to be fed. He had known the winter song; this creature had once been a hobbit, even if its feet weren't hairy and its heart was black.

 

Gollum was once a hobbit, but now was not quite what a hobbit should be. That description applied to Bella. Bella lowered her sword, ran straight at Gollum, and jumped. He started at the sharp slap of her foot on stone, and he grabbed for her as she passed overhead. But her foot clipped Gollum across the face, and his fingers slipped away from her outer petticoat.

“She-Baggins! Hobbitses! We hates it forever!”

  
Bella heard the cry as she bounded away, but she did not feel dread. She ought to have felt dread. But sunshine was upon her face, and of all the mistakes Bella had ever made, she did not think she could count sparing Gollum among them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's not clear: the bolded parts are where the Ring is manipulating Bella, and helping her to think what it wants her to think. This is going to be a thing re: the ring, so keep in mind that bolded=the Ring.
> 
> I have a fondness for fanfiction that plays around with the Gollum confrontation, so I knew I wanted to do something different; it came to me upon realizing that not only does Bilbo receive very little sleep in the film, which for my Bella means there's been no sleep at all (since she didn't sleep at Rivendell, which is the only time rest is implied for Bilbo), but also because I realized getting eaten is an incredibly common theme in the Hobbit. Gollum is hardly an impressive threat compared to wargs; I believe book/film Bilbo ends up riddling, in part because it reminds him of home, but also because he still doesn't believe he could ever actually use his sword. Bella lives in a world that has been rather crueler to her, so I think she's more willing to defend herself than seek mediation. That+finding Gollum unimpressive=this take on the scene.


	8. In Which Bella Flashes Her Underthings, And Also Saves Thorin's Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter-specific triggers: fear of outing, feelings of not belonging.

Bella scrambled down the sheer side of the mountain, her heart in flight. She had survived the threat of being eaten, again. That was the third time! As well as her third time surviving the threat of death via falling (Elrond’s awful bridge included). All while going three days without sleeping. If Bella thought herself in any position to be blessed by the gods, she would have felt sure of their favor. And yet more favor came to her, for as she reached a gentle outcropping of the mountain, she saw the Company stopping for breath just ahead of her. Gandalf was, unsurprisingly, lecturing everyone.

 

“Where is Bella?” he asked, looking at a gray-haired dwarf.

 

“Well I didn’t lose her!”

 

“Then who did?”

 

“She slipped behind when they first got us,” another dwarf said, the one with the most ridiculous hair. She hadn’t known he knew she existed. “She tripped and they didn’t even notice she’d gone.”

 

“So what happened to her? Hmm?”

 

“I’ll tell you what happened.”

 

Bella shook her head. What? Unless Thorin was psychic he couldn’t possibly--

 

“She has headed back to Rivendell, where she belongs,” Thorin said, looking pained, by the mention of elves she was sure. “She will be better suited to the songs and flowers of the elves. We will not be seeing our hobbit again.”

 

That was almost certainly a dire insult, in dwarvish terms. Bella found she was actually quite irritated. Not at being insulted; she was used to that. But she had survived that awful creature, and falling several times, and ripped open her dress and her face and come out the other side, and he thought she was hopping and skipping back to the Hidden Valley? That would not do.

 

Bella took off her ring, stowed it in her pocket and walked up right behind Thorin, feeling anger embolden her voice. “If I am headed to Rivendell, then I would be awfully lost, Master Oakenshield.”

 

The entire Company jumped; Thorin was plain thunderstruck.

 

“Bella Baggins!” Gandalf grinned, looking quite glad at the surprise. “I have never been gladder to look upon your face.”

 

Bella shook her head. “Don’t be rude, Gandalf. I’m glad to see you as well.”

 

“Miss Boggins! We thought you’d died!” cried Kili. Oh, well that was rather blunt of him.

 

“How did you get past the goblins?” Fili added.

 

“Well, I--” Bella realized with a start that her dress was ripped, as Fili glanced down at her midsection.

 

She pulled the ripped tatter of her bodice closed over her exposed stay, feeling the heat the ring had taken away flood back into her. The entire front of her dress had been flapping in the wind! Enough of her dress clung to her, and her stay rode high enough, that she could hope none noticed anything amiss. Bella's hands trembled as she pulled her dress over her stay and held it in its proper place over her faux bosom.

 

“I think that is a question for another time!” Bella cried, shrill. “When I am less nearly naked.”

 

"That counts as naked?" Fili asked. "I was just surprised you wore armor underneath all that frippery."

 

"Common theme," Thorin mutter, for what reason Bella could not discern.

 

"It's not armor. It's for one's posture." And in Bella's case, to stick handkerchiefs down the front of. Bella felt cold sweat trickle down her back as she subtly attempted to gauge if her bosom had shifted in all the excitement. Oh, it had, but not overmuch; not anything that could be noticed with the stay reducing everything down to just the impression of a figure. Good.

 

"You can't just...sit straight?" Balin asked.

 

"I can, but it allows me to sit straighter, as well as slim the lines of my body." Bofur held out his coat to Bella; she grabbed it and shrugged it on, so fast her stay didn't have a chance to reveal itself again. The coat was dirty and stunk of goblins, but Bella appreciated it all the same. "Thank you, Bofur. Now, if we could stop talking about my underthings."

 

“What matters is that Bella Baggins is back,” Gandalf declared.

 

“Yes,” Thorin said. He...did not quite look angry. “I want to know why you came back.”

 

Well, that was much more answerable than how.

 

“You sang. At the Prancing Pony, you sang. You all sang. A-about lost homes, and old tragedies. I haven’t found my own home,” Bella admitted. “I’ve been lost, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a place; the Shire was lost to me well before I left Bree, and I'd thought that was where I belonged. But I’d like to help you find your home. I-If anyone is without a home, it should be me. I should be the only one. So you may doubt me, Mister Oakenshield, and I doubt myself, honestly. But I don’t fancy going back through the goblins to face nothing, when I might do something, even if it is small, on this Quest.”

 

Thorin would just have to deal with it. She’d signed a contract. The only sound in response to Bella’s speech was the rushing of the wind and the sunset's blooming colors, and Bella burrowed further into Bofur’s coat, embarassed.

 

Howls echoed through the forest.

 

Was Bella never going to have a moment of rest?!

 

\--*--

 

Bella swayed in a pine tree with delirium setting in and the vision-spots coming back, and found that she disliked being in a swaying pine tree. What with wargs and orcs below, she found she liked it even less than she liked Elrond’s Bridge of Doom, which had caused her much fright. She reflected that it was not the journey, but the destination that mattered, when it came to falling from heights, and laughed somewhat hysterically as her hands gripped all the tighter. If she survived this, the fourth threat of being eaten and of falling in what now seemed to be nearly four days, she would be tempted to go back to the old ways and slaughter a pig in Yavanna’s honor.

 

The white orc on the white warg seemed to have greatly upset everyone, which Bella did not understand, as he did not seem any more overbearingly frightening than the other orcs did, simply easier to see in the dark. Oh, but he was the leader, she realized--she watched him snarl some sort of dark language at the tree Thorin was in, with his name mixed in. Then he pointed his mace-axe thing at Thorin, and the wargs came at the trees as a wave does at rocks.

 

Bella revised her mental list. Jumping from tree to tree escaping wargs who could apparently tear a strong pine down with the force of teamwork, only to end up on the sheerest, swayingest, on-a-cliffest, pine tree of all, was so much worse than swaying in a normal pine with wargs below, and the Bridge of Doom did not even quantify. No, no, wait. Being on the sheerest, swayingest, on-a-cliffest, pine tree, having escaped from wargs who sought to continue their tyranny of teamwork, while there was _fire everywhere_ because Gandalf was stark raving out of his mind, was the very, very, very, VERY worst, and nothing could possibly top it.

 

(Bella knocked on the tree the very second she had the thought.)

 

Gandalf could be credited in keeping the wargs from immediately violently killing them, but of course thirteen dwarves, a delirious hobbit, and a Gandalf sitting in a tree (K-I-S-S-- _this was not the time for that!_ ) could do all the teamwork that a few wargs could towards attracting gravity to their precarious perch, and the tree swung out over the abyss.

 

Bella was not even going to begin to contemplate how much worse this was.

 

Apparently, making his people hang off a tree like fish from a hook was what broke Thorin into total madness, because he got up and started walking down the tree trunk to its base, seeming bent on attacking the white orc.

 

It was a stupid, awful, plan, and it would get Thorin killed. She did not think he realized it, or would care if he did die; as Thorin charged, she realized he probably did not have any plan at all. He had just wanted to change the cards, to, for a moment, give his people the very barest of upper hands, and so he was doing it. Bella’s heart nearly stopped when the warg leaped and Thorin was smashed to the ground. He got up, of course, but even Thorin seemed to realize he had just leaped into his death sentence. Of course he fought back, but Bella did not think taking a mace to the face was part of some sort of success strategy.

 

Bella hauled herself to stand on the trunk of the tree, and took stock of the situation around her. Most of the dwarves were losing their grip on the tree; she couldn’t do anything about that. There was fire everywhere; she couldn’t do anything about that. Thorin was being bit in half and thrown about; she could do something about that. Sort of.

 

“YOU CAN BUGGER RIGHT OFF!” Bella screamed, slamming into the orc who stood over Thorin, sword raised. He toppled with her weight and the surprise of it, and she managed to stab him. Then she...found herself on top of him, stabbing the orc repeatedly in the chest even as his general lack of response indicated that he had died.

 

Oh.

 

She would think about murder later! Bella pulled away from the orc and parked herself in front of Thorin, sword up.

 

“You should--you should bugger off,” Bella muttered. Her sword was shaking, because her hand was shaking. She held onto it with the other hand as well, and pointed it at each warg as they advanced.

 

Wait! The Dwarves! The Dwarves fighting now! Bless the dwarves! Bless Aule for making dwarves. Bless Yavanna for making the land rich with steel for their blades. Bless all of it ever. The spots are really rather big now, Bella thought, as she attempted to fight off whatever came nearest. Was the white orc/warg combo coming closer? Her vision was all one extra large spot in the middle, but it was a growling, snarling spot, so, probably.

 

Bella meant to squeeze her eyes shut, in anticipation of death, but she was glad she didn’t, because giant eagles showed up then, and she didn’t think they were even a hallucination. They threw trees to the ground, making it shake, and fanned the flames into scorching strength with one or two beats of their wings.

 

Bella was almost serene, as she was picked up and thrown around, to land on the back of an eagle. It would be much, much better for an eagle to kill her than a warg. It did not look as if it would, though. The other eagles seemed to have the rest of the company well in claw, and with swift wingbeats they carried them across the deep valley. The bright flames (she really needed to remember to murder Gandalf later) were not even a small point in the distance when they wheeled and turned around a steep rock only the eagles could possibly access, dropping off the Company so they could huddle around their fallen leader.

 

Thorin looked so calm, unconscious. She had not realized how tense he had been while waking, but the looseness he had now made it quite apparent. Gandalf applied his considerable magic to Thorin’s prone body, and it seemed to shock the breath, the bright fierce fire that had led him to charge the white orc, right back into him. Thorin struggled to his feet with some help, and stared down Bella, as she stood with Bofur’s heavy coat whipping against the eagle’s wind.

 

Thorin stared at her, so impossibly, fiercely alive, and he looked desperate.

 

“You,” Thorin demanded. “What were you doing?”

 

Bella put her hand to her head. The spots were swimming; she was not sure that that was good at all. “Saving your life, I thought. It...seemed a good idea at the time…”

 

“You...you said you were useless, back in the cave.”

 

“Yes.” Bella really thought she ought to sit down.

 

“You said you should never have come.”

 

“Y…..yes.” Ooh. Swimmy spots went all pretty colors.

  
“You could not have been more wrong,” Thorin declared, and rushed forward, to embrace her or-or something. Bella would not find out, because that was when she teetered, tottered, and finally pitched forward, dead asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really need to write more of this down--my lead is shrinking. This is probably my favorite chapter I've written so far--Bella's delirium was a great excuse to make things much more silly than usual.


	9. In Which Bella Tells A Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter specific triggers: discussion of lack of bosom, fear of outing/embarassment at biological features, past transmisgyny and violence towards trans character, self-degradation.

Bella stood by herself in the forest, taking slow breaths, calming herself as she slowly undid the grimy laces of her stay.

 

When Bella had woken up, she had not only been carried down from the Carrock into the surrounding hillside, she had slept for a day and a half. No one would tell her who carried her down the sheer cliff (she suspected Thorin, who would not look at her) and she had been bombarded with worried dwarf faces, food, water, and various embarassingly overdone compliments and praise for saving Thorin’s life, interspersed with actual proper introductions at the behest of Thorin. It wasn’t like they hadn’t all come to Thorin's defense just a moment after Bella; but somehow, because she had done it first, that meant they were acting like she’d done something altogether remarkable.

 

Bella had managed to get them all away eventually, so she could change into another dress (and give Bofur back his coat), and most importantly, have some _space_.

 

Bella slipped off her stay, breathing deeply and letting her aching ribs swell and expand, and her back to slump and unwind. She swiftly caught the tight-pressed wads of handkerchiefs that had simulated the smallest swell of bosom before they fell to the ground, laying them gently atop her stay on the ground. She removed her neck-kerchief and set it on the pile as well. Then she set to unlacing and removing her petticoats.

 

Bella liked that the dwarves were being nice. She didn’t seek to reject kindness. But it just seemed...out of place. She could still feel her faults stabbing her: clumsy, ugly, sinful, useless. She had not managed to transmute any of her qualities into virtues. She had simply survived, and assisted the tiniest fraction of a second before the rest of them. And then, she had fallen over on them and cost them well over a day’s lead in the race to outrun the orcs. It was simply not something to celebrate over, and she was at a loss to explain what the dwarves’ perspective could be to produce such attitudes.

 

Bella set her two petticoats to the side and looked down at herself, inspecting the state of her body as much as she could with her slip still on. She knew her face looked a right mess, with the giant cut that pulled and tugged at her skin. Her right shoulder was blooming many colors, mostly green with a good dose of purple and yellow, and she could feel tender spots along her abdomen especially where the bones of her stay had been pressed into her ribs by various impacts with the ground. Her hands were scabbed over, her palms and fingertips and knuckles all covered in drying blood. Her feet had at least fared a little better, although she had to pick some dried blood out of her leg hair that she did not think was hers. The long stripes of dried blood that peeled away from her forearms and hands were definitely not hers; she realized she must have been sprayed by the blood of that orc that she had stabbed in the neck.

That was right; Bella had killed someone. A living person.

 

No. An orc, that had been about to decapitate Thorin. Right.

 

Bella rummaged through her pack and found her serving dress, incredibly wrinkled but at least not torn or stained. It was a dark green and much plainer than the dress of her mother’s that she’d run out of the Prancing Pony in. But it was, in retrospect, a better choice for such a journey, even if it was shorter and it was harder to arrange the neckline to hide her lack of bosom.

 

Bella shook her petticoats out and stepped back into both, carefully tying them neatly at her waist. Then, she put her stay back on, lacing it up partway, positioning her faux bosom in it, and then lacing it tight, pulling her waist back into the tapered, feminine shape the stay gave it. She stuffed her neck-kerchief into her bodice and pulled her dress over her head, tugging on the skirt to pull the whole thing into fitting better on her body.

 

There. Now she felt natural.

 

A howl echoed through the air, thin from distance and its own echoes, but Bella wasn’t about to forget a warg howl just because she’d slept for a little while. Bella bolted to her pack, pulling her sword free and putting her back to the closest tree as she heard a creature bound through the forest in her direction. She put her hand to her pocket, and fingered the ring there. **She would just have to put it on,** if it came to being eaten again.

 

The footsteps crashed in grand crescendo, but the warg howl did not seem to come closer, probably because what came out of the bushes straight at Bella was _not_ a warg. No warg in its dearest hopes and dreams could have achieved the size and muscle this beast had, nor the pure violence in its gimlet eye. It looked a little bit like drawings of bears that Bella had seen, only much less round and far more scarred, and far more toothsome. Most bears were depicted with brown fur, not the rich, deep black of the beast before her, and she did not think their claws were meant to be quite so long. The bear-thing crashed to a stop, close enough that Bella could have leaned forward and tapped it on the nose with her sword.

 

It stared at her, and Bella stared at it.

 

Then the great beast roared, a deafening noise that was very like the roaring she'd heard when they’d fallen down the the goblin’s trap in the mountain, as all around her dwarves had crashed and her own ears had whistled uncontrollably through the air, and goblins screamed and clattered throughout their rickety establishment; except there hadn’t been anything innately fearsome in the _noise_ of falling, and the beast’s roar made her stomach drop into the tips of her toes.

 

Bella screamed. She felt rather justified in it, but was entirely mortified when the noise that came out of her was decidedly deeper than she would have liked, making her sound like a bullfrog in distress. She shoved her fist in her mouth to keep anything quite so awful from escaping again.

 

The beast turned and loped off. Bella slumped, pressing her forehead to the pommel of her sword. She removed her fist and sighed. “Sweet Yavanna, why on earth would you see fit to make something like that? I can see maybe _me,_ in your amusement, but... _that?_ ”

 

The bushes crashed and snapped again, and Bella rushed to her feet, but it was the company, led by Thorin with Orcrist raised and his coat dangling off one arm. He looked around in confusion. “We heard a great roar, and then screaming.”

 

“There was a beast!” Bella cried, feeling defensive. “Of course I screamed.”

 

Thorin scanned the trees around them, peering suspiciously at bushes and logs. “What sort of beast?”

 

“Oh, it was monstrously large and a bit like--”

 

“A bit like a bear?” Gandalf strode to the front, projecting the truly unbearable aura of  _I am a wizard so of course I know more than I let on previously_  with every step.

 

“Actually, yes, only bigger. Much bigger. How did you know?”

 

Gandalf chose not to answer, instead musing while the dwarves broke out into argument about how to respond to this latest threat. Bofur thought they should double back; where to, Bella thought, right into the arms of the orcs? Others muttered about setting a trap, as if such could be devised for a creature of such nightmarish size.

 

“There is a house,” Gandalf declared, with a strange note of foreboding. “Nearby. Where we might take refuge.”

 

“Whose house? Friend or foe?” Thorin demanded, which was a fair point, since Gandalf did not seem overly confident in his own plan.

 

“Neither,” Gandalf said, in a way that really meant “probably a foe, but the kind that will kill us quickly.”

 

“Is there anywhere else?”

 

Another roar made them all jump.

 

“No,” Gandalf admitted, and they all got to running, quite quick. They made their way out of the foothills of the Carrock and into the flat riverbed of the river Anduin, nearly empty of water at this time of year. Bella was reminded fairly uncomfortably of their flight to Rivendell--hopefully the end results would be as pleasant (minus Bridge of Doom). Howls of wargs and the roar of the beast pursued them alike and they burst from a thick copse of trees to see a wall of shrubs encircling some sort of farm or encampment in the middle of a clear valley.

 

They fled through the open archway in the shrub wall and Bella’s feet tingled as she passed through the gate onto the neatly attended soil and plantlife of the garden surrounding. Bella hopped and slowed and so she found herself near the back of the mass of dwarves pounding anxiously at the door of the house for entry. Bella barely slipped through the door before the bear-beast’s jaws came through also, snapping and growling. All the dwarves had to shove together to make the great muzzle retreat far enough for the door to be latched.

 

“What was that?” demanded the youngest one, Ori, that was it.

 

“The owner of these lands, and this house,” Gandalf told him.

 

\--*--

 

Bella felt the truest irony sting her as night hushed the house as dwarves into sleep, because she found she could not rest, because of course she couldn't. Bella put on the robe she had...borrowed from Rivendell (it was hobbit-sized and thus surely her mother’s; had she been meant to resist taking it with her?) and shuffled around the floor, picking her way between feet and weapons to the eating area Beorn had built to stand above the bare floor. She had not seen a way out into the open air besides the overlarge door, so she contented herself to sit at the chess table, looking down at the livestock and dwarves below. It was very surreal. She had not, aside from her mother and father, seen people sleep before. In theory she knew different people slept differently, but the dwarves put point to it. Each was arranged in some slightly different way, limbs sprawled, fingers tangled in weapons, legs straight as a board or curled up tight. Each and every one trusted her to see them like this, just as they trusted each other, all twelve of the sleeping dwarves.

 

Wait, twelve…?

 

It occurred to Bella to turn around, and she nearly jumped out of her skin to see Thorin, smoking a pipe and smirking at her from the bench seat of Beorn’s unreasonably massive table. So she was not the only one sleepless and restless.

 

“I slept for a day and a half,” Bella said. “What is your excuse? You should be sleeping.”

 

Thorin blew a smoke ring. Bella coughed. “I admit I should, and yet I am not.”

 

“Ah. One of those nights then.” Bella hopped down from her perch at Beorn’s chess table and then hauled herself onto the table bench beside Thorin, so that she could be quieter and less of a disturbance to the Company. “I did not think Princes were susceptible to such things. I would think with people under your care worrisome nights would come so often they would be the norm.”

 

Thorin did not seem to expect that answer. “Usually, yes. But I am not...worrisome, but worried. However Gandalf assures us we will be safe, our host still assumes the shape of a mad beast, and we are in his halls.”

 

“So you’re keeping watch.” Without telling any of the others, so they might sleep in comfort, not knowing their leader's own sacrifice to make it so. “That seems quite sensible, actually. Have you ever heard the tale from Men of what they call Amaeod the Wargskin?”

 

“No, I have not.”

 

Bella spread her hands wide, settling herself in for a good storytelling. “Among Men, there is a superstition that there are certain cursed Men whom the ripened moon will transform into Wargs, bereaving them of all sense and driving them to seek the blood of women, children, and horses. I have heard tell that in some small villages of Rohan one can be convicted of having the Wargskin curse in court and executed, if you can believe such a vile thing.

 

‘Among their many tales told at night of the Wargskin, the most famous is Amaeod, who was once a lord of the lands of Rohan. It was said he had five sons, one daughter, and much glory in battle, having slain many an orc and Easterling. In one conflict with an Easterling raiding party, he mortally wounded a young soldier. The soldier was the son of an Easterling sorcerer, also at the battle, and before the sorcerer fell himself, he cursed Amaeod, to become a monster of death, forever seeking to quench his thirst with the blood of his own sons. Amaeod and his people did not heed the Easterling, thinking his heathen magic could not truly afflict Amaeod so, and they returned to their great hall, feasting for many days.

 

‘However, after the first full moon, Amaeod woke to find his youngest son dead in his crib, and blood upon his own hands. His warriors were grievously wounded, speaking of a great Warg that had rose from the lord's own bed, slaughtered his child, and then prowled the halls looking for his other sons, no matter how fiercely he was fought off. Amaeod grieved at this, realizing the Easterling curse had come true, and left his lands, leaving his wife as lady of his lands and the rest of his sons, he hoped, alive and well. But every time the full moon came, his great Warg form bounded back over even the greatest distances to the lands of his people, fighting his soldiers fiercely and trying to kill his sons. Soon no soldiers were left, nor sons, and his wife and daughter were forced to kill Amaeod with the swords the sons and men had left behind. It is said that is why even today the noblewomen of the houses of Rohan are taught in arms, so that they may defend their great halls, even from their own lords.”

 

Bella coughed, and blushed, realizing she had rambled on quite a ways. “Of course, Men being as they are, they tell the story in this great long poem with a lot of bemoaning the fate of the Lord and the inevitability of death, but that is the story as I understand it.”

 

“You told it well,” Thorin said. “Your craft could be storytelling.”

 

“I have been known to tell stories in the past, but mostly to young children. What do you mean, my craft?”

 

“Every dwarf has a craft, and we believe all other races have crafts in them as well, even if they do not recognize it as such.” Thorin blew out a thoughtful trail of smoke. “A craft can range from a talent for tending the home to great prowess with axe or sword, not simply the making of things, although those crafts are often chiefly honored. It is what one excels at more than all other things, what lights a dwarf’s passion from within. You seemed very well suited to storytelling, so it could well be the craft of your own heart.”

 

“I admit it often brings me happiness, but I cannot claim to excel at it.” Bella supposed the crafts of some of the other company were obvious; Bombur’s was cooking, and Dwalin’s was certainly axes, and Kili the bow. But Thorin did not seem to have an obvious craft, unless leadership counted. “What is your craft?”

 

“Mine is smithing. A useful craft, and the most common among dwarves.” Thorin hmmed. “I am neither the best nor the worst. I simply am.”

 

“I see. I can’t imagine you have much use of it, being a prince.” While Thorin presented crafts as an idealized notion, she couldn’t think that every dwarf got to pursue their ambitions as their careers. There had to be maids and serving men, and nobles surely couldn’t spend all their time painting instead of being nobles.

 

“I thought so as well when I was younger, in Erebor,” Thorin said. He frowned deeply, in the way one does when recalling something that still stings bitterly. “But after my people fled from the mountain, we had to find what money we could, to feed our people and ingratiate ourselves to whomever owned the land where we rested. I worked as hard as the rest, smithing in Men’s forges for a fraction of the price our professional smiths had once demanded. It stung bitterly, especially to those who had been professionals. But we survived because of it.”

 

“It had not occurred to me what must have happened after the dragon,” Bella admitted. “How many of you travelled so?”

 

“Out of six million dwarves dwarves in Erebor, a half million escaped the mountain. We estimate that about three hundred thousand dwarves currently living are survivors or children of survivors. About two thirds of that number currently live in Ered Luin, the most concentrated settlement of survivors.”

 

Bella did not know how to react to that, beyond blinking very rapidly. Two hundred thousand seemed a mightily vast number to live in one place, compared to the Shire, which boasted as many as fifty thousand when it was overcrowded. But compared to a population once as strong as six million… “Ered Luin is even farther west than the Shire, is it not? We have had such trouble in the return direction, I am quite impressed that you were able to make it that far west with two hundred thousand.”

 

“It was not simple or easy. But we survived.” Thorin shook his head. “I do not know how Dis and I held so many people together for so long.”

 

Bella shivered. A dragon was awful, but this sort of catastrophe was beyond her imagining. She worried every day about little more than herself, when the Company had seen the majority of their people die. They knew heartbreak well beyond what any hobbit could bear without Fading. And Thorin had managed it all with Dis’s help, who was his...sister? sister-in-law? Fili and Kili’s mother. Thorin was not only a prince, but a leader.

 

Bless Yavanna, but Bella was quite impressed and esteemed of Thorin, in that moment. He was some sort of grand and overwrought leader, and he talked to her in the nighttime, in her dressing gown. It hardly seemed to add up.

 

“Miss Baggins.” Thorin’s pipe had gone out; he seemed content to leave it so. “I admit to being curious. Hobbits, from what little I have known, have a reputation for being...kind, if a bit insular.”

 

"And I am not?" Bella felt heat rush to her cheeks; goodness, what had she done to offend?

 

“And Marjorie Cotton was not.”

 

Well. Bella felt caught; she had to lie, at least a good bit, but she also felt she owed Thorin some version of the truth. He had been very kind to her, knowing so very little about her, and she was beginning to see why he seemed innately mistrustful of outsiders. He could not have experienced much kindness, attempting to buy or barter for the lives of two hundred thousand. To lie to him extensively after such experiences would only align herself with the terrible people Thorin had met in his travails; yet, for her own safety and continued life, she could not tell the whole truth.

 

“Marjorie’s response is not unusual,” Bella began, very carefully. “I am not well-liked in the Shire. Marjorie was at the forefront of those that...encouraged me to surrender Bag End to my cousin Lobelia and live elsewhere.”

 

With rocks. Bella remembered that Marjorie had encouraged the others to throw them at her feet, to break her toes so that every contact with the Earth would bring her pain. She had been successful; two toes on Bella’s left foot were still crooked.

 

“I wish I could say that I did nothing to deserve it. Oh, I did not steal or murder or lead men on.” Reggie Blackthorn had thought differently, as had the Shire at large when he had spread his version of their courtship far and wide. But Bella knew she had done nothing to Reggie, except fail to lift her skirts for him. “But I have never been a good person, I am afraid. I have done very little of what society thinks is proper; I do not say my prayers or do as I’m bid, when the bidding is disagreeable. And I have now set out into the wild with a troop of dwarves. I am sure even the men of Bree think me a fallen woman, now.”

 

“The Shire does not see you as I--as the _Company_ does.” Thorin fidgeted. “The Shire does not deserve you, nor any of their prosperous lands, if they cannot see you as a brave and admirable woman.”

 

Bella hid her face in her hands. That was entirely too much for any man to say to her, especially one as admittedly well-shaped as Thorin. For him to be so tall and strong, and to be so kind, was rather more than her heart could bear. And to call her a woman...! (No being could be so consistently wonderful, and she knew she merely did not know him well enough to be able to enumerate his faults. But the mere illusion that he might be strong and noble and kind was overwhelming to her senses.) “You do me a kindness in that assertion, Master Oakenshield.”

 

There was the gentlest of touches on her shoulder, entirely brief and entirely warm. “Call me Thorin, please. You have earned the right.”

 

“Yes, um. Thorin.” Bella stood upright, and looked to where her blanket lay. “Please call me Bella. I am tired so I think I will sleep now. Good night!”

 

Bella fled down the stairs and to her blanket, pulling it well over her head as she hastened to appear composed and asleep. Her heart beat wildly and her cheeks felt fit to start a fire.

 

Thorin had been kind, as befit someone whose life had been saved by another, sort of, a little bit, and Bella was brainless enough to have her head turned by it. She could not let it drive her to foolishness; it was rather beyond contemplation that she not only be a silly, useless, charade of a woman on this important Quest, but she could not bear the thought of making her affections any more inflamed, or obvious to Thorin. She was troublesome enough, and she wanted neither to burden him, nor to invite his scorn.

  
(Bella did not hear Thorin return to his bedroll that night.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story Bella tells is a modified version of old folk tales about werewolves, and Beowulf. In medieval times lycanthropy was not a condition passed on with bites, but most often a curse placed upon a person, which compelled them to become animals and kill people at the full moon; it was probably used to explain away mental illness and serial killers, as opposed to being a metaphor for loss of control and the id, as it's generally painted these days. "Warg" is actually an old term for werewolves, and it's now my personal headcanon that wargs were men, originally, until they weren't. I infused Beowulf with the story because Rohan is rather obviously based on that time period of English history, which Tolkien obsessed over and taught in his classes. It was said that he would make grand entrances to new students by showing up late, throwing open the back doors of a lecture hall and reciting the opening of Beowulf in the original Old English as he strode to the podium. So basically I had a bit of fun and wondered, based on these facts, what Rohan's fairy tales would be like, and there we go.


	10. In Which Bella Is Not The Only Woman Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: reference to past hate crimes, dysphoria, siblings being violent to each other, dysmorphia due to gendered clothing.

At breakfast, Bella made sure to sit on the far side of the table from Thorin (and Thorin's brooding), so that she could stop being overwhelmed and get over her foolishness as soon as possible.

 

By rights, she ought to have a crush on every member of the Company, if she was going to respond to kindness with feelings. They had all shown her kindness following her defense of Thorin, and a good deal of friendliness; Bofur in particular had been quite nice even from the start. Fili and Kili had been nice, and handsome to boot, _and,_ from what Bella knew of dwarven aging, they were probably only fifty or seventy-five years her senior, as opposed to well over a hundred.

 

Thorin was mean, regularly grumpy, and quite attached to hating elves for their existence, which Bella found odious, frankly. Thorin shouted at his nephews. Thorin did mad things, like charge down giant wargs so that _she_ had to save him. Thorin had hair, lots of hair, and Bella could only speculate at what his chest and back looked like. Thorin had that pointy nose; he probably poked people's eyes out when he kissed them. (Unless he--No!) Thorin probably had a wife too, a lovely princess in Ered Luin who was waiting for him to reclaim their mountain. Thorin was a prince! He was going to be a King and rule lots of people and set a good example by having a wife and lots and lots of dwarven babies. Thorin probably hated short women, and chubby women, and he probably thought the color of her skin was the weirdest thing in all of Middle Earth. This was all _on top_ of the fact that Bella's affections had only ever been responded to with exile and stoning.

 

“Bella?” Ori asked, poking her in the arm. “Are you sure you want quite that much honey on your toast?”

 

Bella started, and realized she had drowned her toast very thoroughly. She put the honeypot down.

 

“Oh dear. I was not attending to my actions,” Bella admitted. She was ridiculous. She needed to stop, and to focus. Explaining to herself why her feelings were unsuitable would keep her at it all day; she just had to stop. Just absolutely, completely stop.

 

Back in the real world, Thorin and Beorn were having a conversation about orcs and their plans and such. Beorn in man shape was three times the size of any dwarf and had skin of an even darker shade than her mother’s once-prized skin, which had been praised for being as dark as the most fertile earth. Bella wondered if all his people looked so, and wished to ask, for she not seen a trace of dark skin in any other race of Middle Earth, and her people hardly knew where to look for their like, hobbit history being vague prior to their settlement in the Shire. But he was frightening, frankly, so her mouth found itself shutting down before words could escape her; although she felt Beorn had looked at her once or twice with something like kinship.

 

Thorin, throughout his entire conversation, was standing aloof against a pillar, as if that were some sort of proper way to talk to one’s host, and it was clear that he was not trying overhard for civility. He was as ridiculous as Gandalf, and he didn’t even have the excuse of being immortal and all-powerful. (There were no chairs for Thorin to sit in anyway, with his Company all eating. But Bella chose not to notice that.)

 

Beorn was saying very dire things to Gandalf now, about Mirkwood being consumed with darkness and such, and some things that were only going to reinforce Thorin's elf-based prejudices. Beorn was then quite racist about dwarves, and there was nearly blood drawn, except somehow Beorn got turned around into letting them have whatever they would like. Bella wondered if this was a man sort of thing, to be antagonistic as well as helpful. Certainly Beorn and Thorin shared the trait.

 

There was a knock on the door.

 

Beorn looked at Gandalf. “Did you leave a dwarf behind?”

 

“No!” Gandalf counted heads. “Er, no. The wards on your land still hold?”

 

“They will until I draw breath no more. _No_ evil may step here,” Beorn growled. Oh! That explained the tingle Bella had felt upon entering his lands; spelled earth always made her feel a bit itchy.

 

“May I get the door for you, then, Master Beorn?” Gandalf lifted his staff in a way that seemed to indicate that he was an all powerful wizard, who could probably deal with whatever was at the door best of all present, if it were a terrible evil or a bunny rabbit.

 

Beorn nodded, and Gandalf crossed the hall to the large doors. He pointed at heart height, used his free hand to lift the latch, and slowly, swung the door inward just a fraction, enough to peek at what lay outside.

 

“Excuse me, but have you seen-- _GANDALF_.” The voice of whomever stood on the stoop did not sound like and orc.

 

Fili and Kili's heads whipped around in unison. “Mother!” They cried, and sprinted to the door.

 

Gandalf threw the door wide, and someone that looked rather like Thorin stood on the other side. Dis--well, it had to be Dis, because she had the same high nose and long, dark hair, the same sharp eyes, and the same beard, although she'd shaved some sort of complex design into it that made Bella feel dizzy. Her armor had the same sort of pattern as Thorin’s, but she also had a shining, engraved breastplate with matching hand-arm things, Bella didn’t know what those were called. What could be seen of the fabric she wore was not the dark blue Thorin, Fili, and Kil all favored, but a rich, dark red. At her hips were two daggers, each the length of Bella’s own sword, and across her back were a large pack accentuated with a truly monstrously sized bow and a thick quiver.

 

Dis took a moment to smile at her children, and her eyes tracking the figure in the shadow of the pillar. “ _THORIN._  Come here.”

 

Thorin descended the steps slowly, and ambled to the door even slower. Bella realized halfway through he was exaggeratedly favoring his side, as if his injury greatly pained him. He was also limping and squinting at Dis as if he could not parse where he had seen her before.

 

“Did something happen to you?” Dis asked when Thorin was halfway across the hall, her hands placed definitively on her hips.

 

“I was bitten by the White Warg,” Thorin told her, making sure to exhale and inhale as loudly as possible. “Azog is still alive, by the way.”

 

“I know, I had to evade his hunting party on the way here.” Dis stared at Thorin, quite intently, and he sheepishly dropped the limp and hurried to her.

 

“It is nice to see you, brother,” Dis said, and punched Thorin in the stomach. Dis wiped her dirty boot on the back of his jacket and stepped over him. “I’m so glad you told me you were taking my sons on this mad Quest, and not just traveling to the Blue Mountains to make trade negotiation. I am so glad you were honest with me.

 

‘I am even gladder,” Dis continued, turning to face Thorin as she strode backwards towards the breakfast table, “That you told me about this Quest at all! That I did not have to find out from a note dear Gloin left his wife, insisting that he had to leave in the dead of night, so that he could help his king slay a dragon, and to take care of Gimli and not follow him. Oh, on that note, Gloin, I have a message from your wife.”

 

“Oh!” Gloin looked delighted. “Is she well? How does Gimli fare?”

 

Dis settled herself into Fili’s seat, shrugging off her pack and bow and setting them at the floor by her feet. She inspected Beorn's bread with narrowed eyes. “She and Gimli are fine. But she wishes you to know that you are an idiot; even without Gimli to care for, she would never abandon her tannery for all and sundry to run to the ground.”

 

Gloin winced. “Aye. She’ll not thank me for forgetting her dedication to her business.”

 

“Oh, she says she has plans for you,” Dis told him, which actually seemed to make Gloin very cheerful.

 

Dis looked at Bella “Well! I had heard rumor that you lot had abducted a maid from Bree, but I thought it was the usual slander against our type. Gloin, I believe your letter rather specifically mentioned that no women were joining your quest, as were ‘too precious to risk,’ or some other nonsense?”

 

“Aye, but this is different. Her people can afford to lose her!" Gloin winced. "My pardons, Bella, that was badly said. I only mean that your people have as many women as men, when we only have one woman for every five, and it would be a curse to us all to let yet another be roasted alive by Smaug.”

 

“Bella's people may be fortunate enough to pass your misogynistic inspection, Gloin, but she is a maid, and not a warrior." Dis smiled at Bella. “I saw the Shire on my way, I can see why anyone would want to leave it behind. But if you wanted for a fourteenth Company member you could have been honest with me, rather than relying on dumb luck to supply you with the one hobbit willing and able to comply with you lot's lunacy.”

 

Thorin seemed to have recovered, enough to mount the steps to Beorn’s table. “Do you mean to join us?”

 

“I did not cross half of Arda just to berate you for making off with my sons. I could have sent the ravens if I'd wanted to do that. No, Thorin, I came because you thought I wouldn't want to go _home._ ” Dis smiled; she looked neither happy nor safe to approach. "Thorin, you have the hardest head that Aule every carved."

 

Dis and Thorin took to arguing in quiet voices, and the others returned to their breakfast business. Bella was quite shellshocked. Was this what all dwarven women were like? She hardly seemed different from the men. She wore trousers! And a beard!

 

Bella turned to Ori. “I don’t mean to pry, but are beards a common feature for dwarven women?”

 

“Hm? Oh, yes! All of our people grow them. Women tend to grow thinner ones, of course, but they make up for it with artistry in design.”

 

 Of course. “Do all your women wear trousers?”

 

“Usually, yes. Tradeswomen and musicians such, who don’t have as much physical labor, will sometimes wear skirts, but mostly they’re out of fashion at everything but the most formal events. Outside of dwarrow settlements no woman would _dare_ wear skirts.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Even fewer than our women are the Men who will treat a woman who trades with them the same as a man. It used to be, in the height of Erebor, our women would make a point of flaunting their femininity, of making men respect them out of force, in order to trade for our riches. But once we became a migrant people, and they thought our women were helpless…”

 

 

Bella shuddered.

 

“The Company has actually admired you, for continuing to wear skirts on our Quest,” Ori told her. “You have gone much farther than any dwarven woman could bear to go in a dress.”

 

“Well, I couldn’t bear to do it in trousers,” Bella told him. “Any more than I could wear shoes. It simply isn’t done in my people.”

 

“Then we shall continue to admire you for your skirts and your bare feet,” Ori proclaimed. A cheer of "To bare feet!" rung round the table, followed by the crunch of toast.

 

\--*--

 

Dis heard out Thorin’s explanation of the moon runes on the map (“I can’t believe you asked elves for help, brother, are you sure you are not ill?”) and agreed that they needed to set out immediately. Bella did not realize the problem with their preparations until she was once again set before an entirely overlarge pony that she was meant to ride.

 

“Oh dear."

 

Gandalf mounted his monstrosity as if he were an absurd gray butterfly, fluttering up and astride with ease. "My point on trousers still stands."

 

“Your point is still ignored.” Bella knew some women of Men sat with both legs on one side of the horse, but unless she could find some way to strap herself down, she did not think she could survive such a maneuver. Aching legs it was. If she could find a way to actually get on the pony.

 

Thorin put a hand on her shoulder (Bella squeaked), and then knelt in front of the pony, his hands cupped.

 

“Oh. Thank you. I...yes, thank you.” Bella stepped into his hands, and her foot tingled, her senses telling her that his rough hands were made of the stones of hills and mountains, the kind that farmers mixed into their fields to imbue the plants with extra minerals. Bella shook her foot at to make it stop tingling.

 

“Thank you, Thorin.” Bella bowed in her saddle at him.

 

Thorin was looking at her foot, and started. Then he nodded and walked away.

  
No crushing on Thorin, Bella reminded herself. Your feet are telling you he is stone itself, and that does not bode well for Questing, much less...liking. Esteeming. Wanting to touch his face with her hand...

 

Bella fell off the pony.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dis. Because objectively, Dis should be in everything forever the end.
> 
> I didn't get to include it in this chapter, but when I decided to make Beorn black I developed a headcanon about the origin of hobbits and shapeshifters that I wanted Beorn to relate to Bella for various reasons; unfortunately, it was a bit out of character for him. But anyway, my in-fic explanation for characters of color (and their relative rarity) is thus: far to the east in Middle Earth, at the beginning of the first age, Yavanna grew a large and glorious garden, because she could and because even goddesses need private studies. Yavanna grew the hobbits in the soil of this garden so they could tend the plants, and she made the shapeshifters out of the animals in the garden so that they could tend the animals. They all lived very happily until Melkor or Sauron or someone messed it up, because of course they did (I'm thinking giant spiders were involved), and Yavanna bid her creations to flee her garden to the west, so that they could reach safety of elven lands. The elves thought shapeshifters were creepy so the shapeshifters went to live in the mountain ranges. The hobbits got mistaken for elves (they were taller then), they boned, ended up with white hobbits, and then settled in the Shire so they could have gardens and fields like back home. They got short because because and thus, hobbits.
> 
> Yeah, it's a bit silly. But it bothers me that Middle Earth kind of stops at a vague "oh and THAT'S WHERE THE NASTY MIDDLE EASTERN ALLEGORY LIVES." Like, oliphaunts have to come from somewhere. So I figure there's a big whole world beyond what Tolkien ever talked about, and that's where hobbits are from. And they're black, cause to heck with Eurocentrism.


	11. In Which Bella Cries Over Mittens (And Other Outerwear)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: discussion of gendered clothing, discussion of pre-transition past, dysphoria.

Dis rode next to Bella as they meandered through what seemed endless miles of rolling meadows, a safe haven under Beorn's protection. Hobbit as she was, she couldn't help but wonder why he would hold but a small garden and farmed fields, and then maintain so much land with naught but grass and flowers. Maybe it was for the sake of the large bees that rumbled past them.

 

“I am not sure I like those creatures,” Dis said, looking at the bees with her brow furrowed. “I know they have something to do with the flowers blooming, but they are troublesome enough when they are the proper size.”

 

“Bees make all plants bloom, and they are important to the growth of fruits and vegetables,” Bella told her, because really. Bees should be no worry for a woman who had crossed Middle Earth, by herself, to tell off her brother and children. “I imagine Beorn has bred them so large so they could produce more honey, and tend to more flowers; or perhaps everything in this part of the world is oversized.”

 

“Hmm.” Dis looked at Bella carefully. “I admit, I cannot understand why you are on this quest. As I said before, I can understand why anyone would leave the Shire, but...you do understand, we seek to slay a dragon and retake Erebor.”

 

“I do. I think perhaps I am looking for some place to be at rest.” Bella breathed in the heady scents of the flowers, feeling calm. “I know I may die, but I have not worried about dying since I was a child. But I have never belonged anywhere in particular, and I admit that it wears at a person. At least on this Quest I am part of a group; I have a purpose, although I still do not know why a burglar is needed to slay a dragon. It’s a better place to be than the places I have been before.”

 

“As for seeking a place to belong and a purpose to be had, the entire Company is of one body with your sympathies,” Dis told Bella, looking genuinely sympathetic. “And a burglar is indeed necessary on our quest, for we require the Mountain Crown and the Arkenstone in order to succeed.”

 

“What are the Mountain Crown and the...Arkenstone?” They sounded like something from her stories. Then again, Thorin seemed like a part of her stories too. (Dis did not seem so; Bella liked her almost more for it.)

 

“They are crown and scepter, if you like, of the throne of Erebor. If we can sneak those out of the mountain without the wyrm’s knowledge, we can rally and have a true chance against Smaug. Now, more importantly. I notice you wear skirts. And you do not wear shoes.”

 

Ori had been impressed, but Dis seemed decidedly not so. “Yes, well, no one in the Shire wears shoes. And I am a woman, so I wear skirts.”

 

“I am a woman, but I wear trousers.” Dis tossed her head. “I hope you do not look down upon me for wearing such things.”

 

“Of course not!” Dis was a princess. How could Bella look down on her? “But, for me, as a hobbit a-and...and as myself, wearing trousers would be like becoming a man, and I could be mistaken for one! I do not wish for that.”

 

Dis shrugged. “I have been mistaken for a man many a time. It is not so bad. You must chafe so, to ride a horse astride in skirts. Are you sure that your dresses are worth that?”

 

“Quite sure.” Bella hoped she looked determined, for she didn’t wish to continue this conversation. “Please, it is my way. I would have it.”

 

Dis nodded. “Then I cannot begrudge you. But I must ask something else of you.”

 

“Oh?” Bella was wary.

 

“I need you to tell me precisely what my sons have been up to on this Quest so far. The others have been defensive on the subject, so they must have been horrible.”

 

Bella laughed.

 

“Oh, so they have been horrific, then.”

 

Dis was going to be a good friend.

 

\--*--

 

Thorin sat beside Bella at the campfire without any pretense or explanation. “I apologize for my sister.”

 

Bella frowned. “Why? She is very nice.”

 

“She is?” Thorin seemed quite taken aback

 

Bella laughed. “Yes. I think perhaps she just does not like you right now.”

 

“That much is assuredly true.” Thorin rubbed at his stomach. “I did not think, when I left her in charge of Ered Luin, that she might come after me.”

 

“Than you probably shouldn’t have stolen her children away like some sort of faerie king. I didn’t know dwarven women took up arms like the women of Rohan.”

 

“They do, although not to fight against their men turning to wargs. Every dwarf is taught basic skills with some sort of weapon. Women may choose to specialize and hone their talent in arms just as any man may choose.”

 

“Oh. But you do not take them on Quests.”

 

“Not women that were meant to be in charge of Ered Luin,” Thorin said, glaring at Dis, who was clearly working up an epic guilt trip in her children. “I think you have misapprehended something of our nature, Bella Baggins. We do not have any women on our Quest because they were all too sensible to agree, or were otherwise busy with their own matters.”

 

“So you’re saying your sister is not sensible?”

 

“No, she is perhaps the most sensible person I know. But, as you said...like a faerie king.”

 

Bella laughed at the way his low voice wrapped around the words (it was either laugh or swoon). “I have seen similar among hobbits. It is said that, were the Shire to ever come to true trouble, vagabonds and armies and such, it would end quite quickly, for the moment they touched a child its mother would gut them all with her mixing spoon.”

 

“I had no idea hobbits were so violent.”

 

“Oh, we’re not, not really. It’s just said.” Except that she had stabbed an orc to death. She stared at her fingers, and wondered how far removed from hobbit ways she might become on this Quest. Whether that was a bad thing, really.

 

“Hmm. Your people did seem rather…”

 

“Peaceful?”

 

“Passive. I wonder whether you see us as barbarians. We must seem intimidating to your people.”

 

“Oh, no! Not at all! Well, any other hobbit would find you quite frightful, yes,” Bella admitted, drawing a smirk out of Thorin. “But from what little I’ve seen, dwarves have a much richer culture and history than any hobbit could lay claim to. You have secret languages and so many different types of braid it makes my head spin, and it all seems to have a meaning to you beyond my ken.”

 

“Many would claim us rude and worldly, as obsessed with gold and gems and customs as we are.”

 

“But you are the children of Aule, it only makes sense your culture would come back to those things sacred to Aule. We hobbits are all about plants and good earth because we come from Yavanna; just because the centerpiece of our culture is less expensive doesn’t mean it’s more legitimate. As if the simplicity of a thing makes it any truer!” Bella scoffed.

 

“It is not how many would see it.” Thorin smiled at her, again; she could not recall him smiling so much, usually. “You show more insight into our culture than most. I thank you for it.”

 

“Well, you’re welcome, I suppose.” Bella was not helping herself. “But it’s really just good sense. Hardly makes me special for using it when most do not.”

 

“It does. It does, when it graces you with a kindness we have found so little outside our species.” Thorin’s face was serious, but something to the set of his mouth made his bearing lighter, less weighed down with the gravitas that seemed as natural to him as his heavy cloak and sword. “Bella, you will be celebrated among our people when this Quest is through, for proof of true friendship and kindness. All will know, and your ‘good sense’ will make you the first Dwarf-friend in centuries. That is no small thing.”

 

First Dwarf-friend in centuries! That certainly did not sound small. Nor did it sound like Bella’s due. (Nor like a romantic inclination...) “Thorin! That sounds distressingly like a title, or like something one ought to consult other dwarves for.”

 

“I have no need for consultation; I am the Prince In Exile, I can name as many Dwarf-friends as I like.” Thorin lifted his chin, smirking. “If I wished to name you a Duchess of Erebor I could do that as well, but if you were so overwhelmed by the idea of being a Dwarf-friend…”

 

“Certainly not!” Bella shook her head at him. Thorin had quite a streak of silliness! She could see how Fili and Kili had got their propensity to tease wildly. Bella, a _Duchess_. Ridiculous.

 

Thorin smiled to himself and turned back to the fire. Bella resolved to give him absolutely no reason to teasingly make her a Duchess, or to give herself any more reasons to actually like him as a person, for the warmth in her gut threatened to spread entirely too far.

 

That was when Thorin accidentally swallowed a bug, and Bella whacked his back until he coughed it back up. Her plan failed almost immediately, as he declared that she must be at least knighted for saving his life, and she had to harangue him, heat making her face blaze like a fire.

 

But she wasn't going to like him any more than she already did. She wouldn't.

 

Absolutely not.

 

\--*--

 

“WHAT THE--”

 

Bella jumped so high off the ground she actually found her hands clinging to the mane of her pony, her feet crammed into the right stirrup, which was painful with just one foot.

 

Thorin and Dis appeared by her pony, drawing sword and bow in similar fluid movements, as the Company drew on their horses.

 

“What is it, Bella?” Thorin scanned the trees, his eyes narrowed. The point of Dis’s arrow followed his sight automatically. “Orcs? Elves?”

 

“No! Much worse!” Bella looked at the ground, and the very sight of it made her stomach churn. “The ground…!”

 

"The ground!" Thorin looked down, and frowned. "The ground?"

 

Gandalf walked over to the pony, as the others boggled at her. “What do you sense, Bella?”

 

“The land is sick,” Bella declared, pointing a shaking hand at the dark earth beneath the trees. “Not just sick, but dying. I do not think I can walk upon it. I cannot. It is…”

 

Bella didn't know how to put words to it. It felt like broken toes, like a field when the crop had drowned and failed, and rotted away. Her feet even now felt as if there were sharp barbs jabbing into them, and she wanted desperately to flee back to Beorn's land and seek the reassurance of his charmed meadows. Or perhaps even further, to the Shire and its steadfast prosperity.

 

“What are you talking about, Bella?” Kili said it, but the entire Company paid close attention, their eyes steady on Bella's face, which did not at all help Bella's shaken nerves.

 

“I suppose you would not be able to tell. But Hobbits--oh, I am not supposed to tell you this, but I will." Bella shook her head. She owed much of her livelihood to the secretive nature of hobbits, but she owed much more to the Company, and they had earned enough of her trust to merit the breach of manners. "We do not just traipse about on our bare feet without reason. We have a connection to the earth; when it is well, it strengthens us. When it is sick or foul, it weakens us in a way akin to a great illness. We are connected to it, and learn from it, the same way your nose instructs you what food is fine or foul. This land has been plagued, by an evil beyond even blight or rot. It is horrible.”

 

Thorin frowned up at Bella. “Mirkwood harms you?”

 

“If Bella is not careful--and she shall have to be--Mirkwood could kill her. Your mother did always say she thought you had a keener earth-sense than most,” Gandalf told Bella, hand too cold on her shoulder. His eyes were sad and torn. “It seems that is not a blessing for this Quest. We will need to cover your feet in some way, I’m afraid, Bella. We cannot keep any of Beorn’s animals and the Company cannot carry you through the entire wood.”

 

Fili smacked a fist to his chest, standing up straight. “We might, master Wizard! I myself could carry Bella for leagues!”

 

“I appreciate your dwarven bravado, Master Fili, but you have your own food and waterskins to carry. Bella.” Gandalf pulled the pony a little further away from Mirkwood, just to where the grasses started to grow again. “You must be shod in some way, and it might be best to cover the whole of your skin, to prevent any accidental contact. You cannot risk falling ill in the middle of the forest.”

 

Bella knew. Gandalf had lectured them all on the ride there on what dangers Mirkwood now held for even common travelers, and that could only be multiplied tenfold for Bella. She had thought she could bear the land, that it might only be as uncomfortable as an exhausted field or a sick tree; but Gandalf was right. If she had to touch the cursed earth, she would die within a day, in spirit if not in body. “What do you suggest?”

 

“Shoes. and trousers.”

 

Bella hopped off her pony just so she could kick Gandalf square in the ankle. A part of her sighed in belief; Beorn's charms stretched just far enough that this land was merely unsettling. “No trousers, Gandalf! I have told you time and again!”

Gandalf grimaced, rubbing his foot as he maintained wizardly balance on the other foot. “Bella, I may not be as sensitive as you to this forest, but I can tell plainly enough that you cannot risk having any significant part of your skin exposed. It could kill you.”

 

“I know, Gandalf. But you cannot just ask me to wear trousers like--!” Like she was a man all over again. Oh, Bella knew she was being ridiculous; these dwarves would never see her as less than a woman with trousers, not when their own princess wore nearly the same outfit as their prince. Her thighs were rubbed down to the thinnest layer of skin after three days of riding, and the idea of dirt getting under her skirts and touching flesh was horrifying. But she would not _feel_ like a woman anymore. She felt sure she would look like she had before, and Bilbo would come out of her, the horrific, suicidal man she’d once been would stumble out of the bad attempt at a woman that she currently was, and they would be able to see him, no matter what she did. She found her hands creeping to her midsection, trying to help her breaths be even and full.

 

“Besides,” Bella managed to say. “No one has any trousers to spare. I’m the only one that still has my pack from the start of the Quest.”

 

“If I may?” Dori stepped out of the assembled Company, his face drawn with concern. “I think I may have a solution that would be pleasing to everyone.”

 

\--*--

 

Bella was sure Dori was entirely too dangerous, with his persuasive voice and hands and complicated tailor’s explanations, for she found herself sitting in the grass a very respectable distance away from the forest, wearing _nothing_ but her stay and the robe she had stolen from Rivendell whilst Dori sat, sewing and cutting away at her slip and petticoats and even her dress while Dwalin, of all dwarves, worked at some spare leather pieces (and where had they gotten those?) that would apparently be transformed into boots. Ori sat beside her, knitting busily.

 

“Don’t worry about your clothes,” Ori told her, smiling amiably. “Dori’s the best tailor in Ered Luin. He’ll fix your clothes right up.”

 

“I still don’t like it,” Bella muttered. Gandalf had insisted, and finally shouted, that Bella needed to protect herself from the forest in order to continue, and the dwarves had looked so concerned that Bella had finally surrendered, with Dori's persuasive voice ringing in her ears. That did not lessen the panic in her chest, nor her frustration. They were sitting here, whiling away their day, just because Bella could not bear for the _dirt_ to touch her. It seemed quite ridiculous. They had a rather tight schedule as it was, it could hardly be worth it to halt everything on Bella’s account, when she’d done little at all to earn it. Everything would work out much better if she just went home and they continued on, but they'd all looked so _horrified_ when she'd suggested it. “It looks like trousers from here.”

 

Ori shrugged, his expression conveying that he really didn’t know enough about tailoring to form a proper response. He got back to knitting.

 

That was another thing. After the business with Bella being delirious from sleep and going after Thorin, everyone was nicer to her; she had to think it had to do with the whole 'you tried to save our king's life' thing, and perhaps Thorin’s newfound determination to talk to her at nearly every opportunity (to tease her, but the Company whispered and smiled like he was making flower crowns for her hair as he did it). It was gratifying to have their good favor, but Bella didn’t feel she had earned that, much less the time and materials they were now wasting on her. She had done hardly anything and gotten so much for it; that was not how the world worked. In Bella’s life, she had found that everything truly worth it had to be fought for, and then worked for with even more determination than one used to fight for it. Otherwise it was killed or forcibly taken from you; there were no exceptions to this, even in the Shire. Bella had not expected the dwarves to have relaxed standards in comparison to hobbits.

 

Thorin himself ambled over to Dori then. He seemed to be feigning relaxment, but Bella could see how his fists clenched, how his jaw sought to go hard with tension. Her aversion to the earth really had nettled him. “How goes the mending?”

 

Dori tore a thread with his teeth, and inverted Bella’s petticoat, so that it was right side out again. “I have just completed it, actually. Come here, Bella, see what you think.”

 

Bella got up, clutching her robe close to her chest, to go over to where Dori had spread out her slip, petticoats, and dress. Each had been altered solely in the skirt area, where Dori seemed to have cut the bottom third of the skirt and sewn it so that the skirt separated into two different legs. The majority of the skirt was still a skirt, but the very bottom had been transmogrified into trousers. Bella bit her lip. “I don’t know, Dori…”

 

“That’s because you haven’t worn it yet!” Dori gathered the clothes and shoved them into Bella’s arms, shooing her over to a ramshackle construction of blankets hung up amongst a tiny clump of non-Mirkwood trees. Had the Company put that up for her? “Go on, girl, see how it pleases you once you've actually put it on.”

 

Bella slipped into the makeshift tent and, as before, dressed rapidly, doing her best not to contemplate her body or its relative open-air nakedness. With a roiling stomach she stepped into her slip, re-laced her stay over top of it, and then stepped into each petticoat, each time feeling a little sick as the snug band Dori had made of her hem caught just below her knee. So much like trousers. Hopefully not too much like trousers.

 

“This style is very popular in the Iron Hills, or so I have been told,” Dori called from the other side of the tent. “The dwarrow women there are partial to skirts, but they also seek to not compromise in riding or keeping clothing out of the fires of forge or candle. So they invented a compromise.”

 

Bella stepped into her modified dress, biting her lip very hard to keep any number of panicked comments from reaching Dori. The dress pulled up slightly higher, allowing a peek of the lace on Bella’s outer petticoat to be seen, which Bella had to admit was quite nice.

 

Bella turned as she secured her dress, attempting to look at the effect. She could really only see the skirt; the petticoats filled it out enough that the dress retained most of its original shape, albeit with a sudden diversion into trousers at the end. The bodice was still the same, still tapered properly, although in all that sewing Dori had somehow found time to add a knotwork design at the neck in silver thread, that really did look pretty. Her skirt still rustled as she moved, her bodice was proper and tapered, and despite her misgivings, she found she could not hate it. She was still….feminine. Feminine in a different way than she usually was, but there was no mistaking what she wore for the rough outfittings of her companions. She practically looked like a fine lady, in comparison to them.

 

Bella pushed aside a blanket and stood before the Company, her eyes diverting to the ground and her arms folding behind her, clinging desperately to each other. “I-I think I like it, Dori. It looks nice.”

 

“Excellent!” Dori beamed, and reached to straighten out her skirt with quick, professional hands. “I was not sure the of the effect dwarrow tailoring would have on your hobbit fashions, but it looks well, if I do say so myself.”

 

“And here are the boots to go alongside it,” Dwalin declared, as Bifur thunked leather in front of Bella.

 

Bella stared at it. “So, do I--stick my feet in from the top, or?”

 

Bifur pointed at the boots and grunted, in...assent?

 

“Alright…” Bella lifted a boot from the ground and found that it was actually very tall, reaching high enough to meet the hem of her modified dress. The entire boot was made of leather, unlike the metal-tipped and wood-soled monstrosities the dwarves wore, and the sides were embroidered with the same knotwork design as Bella’s dress. Bella jammed her foot into it, and after searching somehow found her foot fitting squarely to the bottom. There was a buckle and strap at the top of the boot, and she pulled on it, securing the boot to her thigh. She repeated the process, and found herself standing in boots for the first time.

 

“It’s very nice. Thank you, Dwalin,” Bella managed to say, although on that count she was lying through her teeth. She did not like them at all, but it was definitely the more necessary of the two outfit concessions Bella had made, and she did not need to hurt a very large man’s feelings over something none of them could help.

 

“And now for these...” Bella turned to see Ori, brandishing what had had been knitting beside her. They were dark green, mittens, long enough to meet her dress sleeves at her elbows. They were as dark a green as her dress, with the exception of a vein of silver yarn which looked as much as it possibly could like the knotwork that adorned the dress and boots. There was a button at each wrist, and she found that the mitten peeled back and affixed to the button, so that she might have use of all her fingers without unnecessarily exposing the rest of her skin.

 

“Ori! Did you only just make these? They're beautiful.”

 

Ori twiddled his thumbs, looking abashed. “No. I was just, worried, after we got into that rain after Rivendell--you wear such light layers, Miss Baggins, and with summer waning….”

 

He’d started making these even before she had rushed to Thorin's side on the clifftop? Bella blushed and pulled them on, marveling at how snugly they fit. He had dedicated hours of work to make her some warm clothing. That was...overwhelming.

 

"Thorin suggested it," Ori added, and. Bella was not even going to think about that, she was going to move on, right now.

 

“What does this design mean?” Bella asked, running her fingers over the gloves and then the neck of her dress. It was really quite pretty.

 

“It means dwarf-friend.” Thorin was standing just behind Ori, with Dis, Fili, Kili, and Balin all standing beside him, with a look of mutual mischief. Thorin was holding something. “You do remember that I designated you with that title.”

 

“Yes, of course, but...” But it was rather a lot. But he had suggested the gloves and now she had personalized clothing and-- “What are you holding?”

 

Thorin gave it to her. It was a thick leather belt; it did not have the dwarf-friend knotwork design on it, and Bella thought she had seen Kili wearing it. The belt buckle was worn at the edges with age, and bearing a design of a crown with seven stars, studded with white stones for the stars. Thorin had some things with this on it; was it his family's crest? “Dis pointed out to us that it was time you actually be able to tie your sword to your body, and not your pack.”

 

“Well, thank you.” Of course Dis would. Bella wrapped the belt around her waist and pulled it tight; it was barely snug enough with the buckle tucked into the last possible hole. Bella surveyed herself. Dress and gloves by Dori and Ori, boots by Dwalin, belt from Thorin and Dis and the boys. They had spent half a day, half a day they could have taken to get further into Mirkwood, and sat to do what Bella had thought of as the useless and wasteful necessity of protecting her from her own ingrained sensibilities and sensitivities. And they had chosen to give her more protection than she’d even expected. And they'd added knotwork that said to all who knew it that she was their friend.

 

Bella couldn’t help herself. She put her hands to her mouth to stifle a gasp, and began to sob.

 

“You broke her, Thorin,” Dwalin rumbled.

 

“Bella?” Thorin’s hand hovered above her shoulder. “Are you upset? We only meant to help you protect yourself--”

 

“I’m not upset.” Bella wiped at her eyes, and smiled up at him. He was so close. So marvelous. It was all so suddenly, brilliantly marvelous. “I’m happy.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EXPOSITION EXPOSITION EXPOSITION
> 
> All of this will be important later. But for now it's just Bella crying over mittens.


	12. In Which Bella Prefers That Creatures Not Have More Than the Usual Number of Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: illness, injury, psychosis, internalized racism.

As much as each gift Bella had been given had been infused with a will to keep Bella safe from Mirkwood, the protection of clothing could only do so much against the illness that turned even the tallest tips of the trees terrible, unnatural colors, and made diseased leaves fall like rain upon Bella's shoulders. Bella felt constantly queasy and cold, and by the time they settled around their first meager campfire her feet had been rubbed raw inside her boots. Bella flopped on the ground, bemoaning the invention of footwear. At least Bella looked marvelous. She had to admit, as she had walked, the peculiar dress had grown on her. It wasn’t pretty. It looked mad, really. But she was covered, and she felt safe in a way she seldom did. She felt quite indebted to the others, for their kindness. And so, despite her growing illness and her raw, bleeding feet, she said nothing, and did her best to soldier on.

 

The nights and days passed in a blur, and Bella held onto those grateful feelings as well as she could, even as the forest crept into her bones. She could see it affecting the others too; as the days wore on their minds slowed, and reason did not hold as well as it used to. The prominent grumble became that they would never find the other side. That they had strayed from the path, as ill-indicated as it was, and would be forever lost. Thorin, and then Dis as Thorin seemed to flag, did their best to beat back these grumblings, with reassurances, then outright orders to shut up and keep going. Bella saw them sitting by the fire each night, Dis with Thorin on one side and her boys on the other, murmuring reassurances even as her own eyes grew haunted. Thorin mostly stared at the fire, although occasionally he caught Bella’s gaze. He smiled at it, the first few nights; then he did not, anymore.

 

Bella sat shivering on the fourth night, even though her boots were almost in the fire (she would not have felt it anyway; her feet had gone almost numb from the pain of her boots). Their rations were getting smaller, and Bella found that hunger only made the cold gnaw at her more fiercely. **The world of the Ring had never been so cold, so...sickly. Surely it hadn’t been.**

 

“Bella.” Bella looked up to see Thorin, standing as if his own shoulders were too much weight, above her. “Are you alright?”

 

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m not--sick or anything.” Not too sick, anyway. “Just a little cold.”

 

Thorin shrugged, and Bella thought he was indicating some sort of non sequitur nonchalance, when his outer tunic shifted, and dropped from his shoulders. Thorin pulled it out of his belt and stooped to put it in Bella’s lap.

 

Making her clothes, and lending her a spare belt, was one entirely thing, but this was another! The very _shirt_ off his back...? “I couldn’t possibly--!”

 

“You could. You are the only one among us without a coat, and I have more than enough to warm me.” Thorin flicked his fingers in the direction of where his great fur coat lay atop his pack. “Please. I--None of us like to see this forest weaken you so.”

 

Bella nodded, biting her lip. Her feet and arms had erupted in hives yesterday, and they looked ready to ooze at any moment; with that and her curls drooping and matting together, she probably looked a fright, and Thorin hadn't even seen the open wounds that were her feet at the moment. She was certainly not getting any stronger, and a coat would help little, for cold set deep into the bones. But she certainly didn’t want to worry Thorin or the others. So she put the overcoat on and said, “Thank you.”

 

Thorin made to go back to Dis and his nephews, then hesitated, watching her hands as she pulled the coat tightly around her middle. “You look well in the House of Durin’s colors.”

 

Bella nearly choked; was that why everything he wore was dark blue? That was ridiculous, what if he looked good in colors other than those of his house? Not that he didn’t look absolutely lovely in dark blue, but it seemed a shame to have anyone wear just one color. More importantly, however, was that she was now wearing it, and this belt with the crown and stars on it--if Thorin’s royal family had house colors, they certainly had a house crest, and a crown with stars seemed like such a thing as would be a crest. Good Yavanna, she was outfitted like a member of the house of Durin, with signs of dwarven appreciation sewn into her clothing. She couldn’t imagine how that would look to a dwarf outside of the company. Some form of scandal would erupt, she was sure.

 

The next day, Bella vowed to return the coat, but found herself still too cold to forsake it; it did not do much, but trying to peel it off only made her start to shake and shiver. As she buckled her new belt on the outside of it upon rising, she saw various dwarves of the company give her sly looks; Nori outright grinned when she started blushing. Bella was glad that, at least for her sake, they did not object too much to the way she had been adorned with the signs of their highest house; she knew it must wear on them, to see it ill-used so.

 

As they made their way down a steep ravine, Bofur knocked her on the shoulder, as playfully as he could with the effects of the forest pulling at even his good cheer. “I like the effect of your new garb, Bella. You look like a right Lady of our people.”

 

Bella looked sideways at Dis; she hardly looked like that particular lady. Even in this awful forest, Dis kept her intricate plaits neat, and her tunic wasn't even too badly wrinkled. “Thank you, Bofur, you’re too kind.”

 

“I mean it! All you’d need is some proper braids and you’d look like a lovely young dwarf lass.”

 

“Yes, well...I don’t look too much like a hobbit anymore, that’s true.” She wasn’t actually sure she wanted to look like one, actually. When had being a hobbit ever come to be in her favor? She certainly didn’t want to look like a dwarf, but it seemed no trial, so far from words and stones, to no longer look quite the hobbit.

 

“You’ll always look most like a hobbit, Bella, so long as you’ve got those feet. I’m just saying, Durin’s colors suit you.”

 

“Thorin said so too,” Bella muttered.

 

“Did he?” Bofur looked far too amused. Was Bella flushing?  “Well our Prince is always right, of course. Bet it pleases him like punch to dress you up so.”

 

“H-how so?”

 

“Well, once we retake Erebor,” Bofur declared, with rather more assuredness than Bella thought he actually felt. “There’ll be some as grumble about your being made Dwarf-friend; as you know, it’s not a common occurrence, and there’s those who would argue against anyone outside of dwarrows being allowed such rights. But by wearing Durin’s crest and colors, if you agree to wear 'em in Erebor true and proper, you’re made above reproach. He’s as good as said you’re kin to our highest house, with our greatest kings and heroes; no one could argue with a gesture such as that. Not without risking being brought to the courts for treason.”

 

“I didn’t know.” Bella frowned at herself. “He promised he wasn’t going to make me a Lady!”

 

Bofur whistled, eyes widening. “Weeeeell, you’re still technically not. But you’ll be treated near as well as one all the same. One that’s quite feared to boot, what with Thorin’s wrath and feelings about kin being quite well known.”

 

Bella shook her head. Dwarven niceties were giving her a headache. “He can’t have meant all that, to--to _actually_ adopt me into his house. He just gave it to me because I was cold.”

 

“I would not put it past Thorin to have both your warmth and your future place in society in mind.” Bofur shrugged. “Thorin is not good at showing it, but he values those who show strength, no matter what that strength is. I see your look, Bella, but he’s not one of those that values axes and swords above all else. You’ve had such a strong heart Bella, through this whole journey, and Thorin will surely have taken note of it.”

 

Bella thought of Thorin in the dark of Beorn’s house, complimenting her storytelling and speaking of the many crafts endeavors valued by his people, for their own sakes. It was...nice, to think that Thorin might admire her. Platonically. It was probably only Bofur’s fancy, but it sat in Bella’s chest anyway, and she felt warmed, for a good long while.

 

\--*--

 

Bella felt absolutely no reservations or other ill feelings about stabbing the overlarge spiders. Bella liked normal spiders well enough; they were helpful in a garden, and their spiderwebs looked beautiful when glistening with morning dew. But they had never been large enough for her to discover that they had rather more than two eyes, and Shire spiders were assuredly not large enough to eat her! It was one thing to kill a creature that had normal hands and normal feet and a normal number of eyes, like an orc, and another to look at a pack of spiders  _scuttling towards her._ It was beyond the pale, and it was, she noted, the fourth time now that Bella was facing being eaten. She found their unnatural terribleness and their foul dispositions and the fact that once again, she was looking digestion in the face, made her rather enraged.

 

How _dare_ they. How dare they take her friends, all the people who had been kind to her, the _entire collection_ of them (Gandalf did not count; he was too ridiculous and grand to be truly counted as a friend--more like an easterly wind), and string them up like sausages. **How dare they try to take her precious ring.** Every inch of her skin was covered in oozing hives, her feet were _killing her_ , and these spiders would dare cut off her Quest, before it could be made worth all the pain. Giant spiders, of all the improbable, awful things, were _not_ going to take her friends and her purpose. Her friends deserved better than something so stupidly ridiculous.

 

Bella’s anger/stab/anger spiral was knocked somewhat off course when the elves showed up, and then diverted entirely when she realized the head of their order, who barked orders even as she slew spider after spider, was as dark-skinned as Bella! For a moment Bella thought she saw incorrectly, or that this was some relation of Beorn's, despite his assurances that he was the last of his kind; but her ears were pointed, and she had the air that all elves did, of being something somewhat more than just a soul within a body, with grace and eyes that seemed to shine with the endless vault of stars. Bella sat down on the ground, mesmerized as she watched the elf woman's blades flash. She was dark-skinned, and she was absolutely beautiful.

 

Bella had always had somewhat more pressing concerns than being vain over her skin, but it was well-acknowledged that no matter the good breeding of a dark-skinned hobbit, they could not be as fair as a pale, freckled hobbit, that in their features there was not enough of Yavanna to make them truly beautiful. Bella, even in her vainest moments as a young boy, had only seen herself as eligible based on her lineage and wealth, certainly not her appearance. When she had started wearing skirts and people had started calling her names, "ugly" and "mud-face" were thrown out among the other epithets. Bella was certainly not beautiful, never had been, never could be. But it astounded her to see a dark-skinned woman who _was_ , who could hold the aspect of gods even with a broad nose and the only pale skin being on her palms. Bella was so stunned by it that by the time she came to her senses, she realized the dwarves had been captured by the same elf she was admiring, and she had to trot to catch up with the party headed to Mirkwood.

 

Bella kissed her Ring as she was trotting behind them.  **It was so useful!**  She could yet help the dwarves, unfettered as she was, and she would rise yet more in their esteem. Yes, she would help them again and they would like her.  **Thanks to her precious Ring.**  Yes. She would never be beautiful, but she yet had the capacity to be quite clever indeed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yaaaaaaay Tauriel! I visualize her as being an unholy, beautiful cross between Grace Jones and Lupita Nyong'o. Because I can.


	13. In Which Bella Wakes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: transphobia, past and internalized, significant dysphoria, past homophobia.

Surviving, as it turned out, was more difficult than could have been predicted at the outset. For one thing, Bella had never realized before how easily she took advantage of being visible and basically welcome among the Company--creeping around Mirkwood reminded Bella unpleasantly of her last few days in the Shire, when she would wear trousers and a large hat in an attempt to become anonymous on market days and thus escape the eyes and taunts of her neighbors. She was not very good at truly creeping, as it turned out; She could make her footsteps silent and creep into a room on the heels of an elf, but as often as not the door smacked her in the face and toes for her trouble.

 

Bella slept for long hours as well, in the niche in the wall by Thorin’s cell she had found when they first came to Mirkwood. It seemed, as she continued to wear **the Ring** and be surrounded by its greywashed world, that it took more and more effort to simply function. She slept deeply and dark, waking only with great difficulty, struggling to keep her eyes open, to get to her feet. When she was awake, her feet dragged, and her endless searching for escapes and keys and such, plus keeping an eye on the goings on in the elven court, made her eyes half-lidded and her mind slow. And no matter what blankets she scrounged up, she was always, always, cold. Most often she simply slept without a blanket, as it made such little difference.

 

The Ring had its uses, however, for she had learned some things. The things she had learned were thus:

 

  * Thorin had rather a mouth on him, when it came to being imprisoned by elves. He also, predictably, spent a lot of time brooding silently, or bothering the guards about whether they’d found any more “dwarves.” She presumed he meant her, although why he couldn’t just call her a hobbit she had no idea.
  * The dark-skinned elf was named Tauriel, and the Mirkwood prince Legolas liked her quite a lot, which was a problem, it seemed. While in the Shire dark skin was merely less favored, in Mirkwood it was an indicator that Tauriel was Silvan, which was apparently not a desirable thing to be, and it made her entirely inappropriate material for the prince and frequently, the subject of horrific jokes. Tauriel, for her part, did not not seem at all smitten with Legolas, and Bella noticed that none of the paler-skinned elves dared utter any off-color jokes within her hearing.

  * Tauriel was, however, clearly very sweet on Kili, and Kili was moonstruck by her mere presence. Bella would not have thought them a good match at the outset, but watching Tauriel sit with Kili when she had a chance, and exchange stories of protecting caravans and kings and seeing places the other one could hardly dream of, Bella found herself endeared to the pair. Happily for them, Thorin's cell was positioned just out of sight and sound of Kili's, and the rest of the Company may have grumbled, but not a soul told Thorin of the increasingly intimate meetings.

  * The king of Mirkwood, Thranduil, was absolutely crazy. He talked quite a lot to a large elk, muttered about gems, and seemed to enjoy inviting Tauriel to his chambers to say bad things about her and her people, then making her leave. It seemed he had not yet been overthrown or encouraged to retire because he threw the best parties, which Bella admitted would be a factor in his favor in hobbit society as well.

  * Legolas was very spoiled, and a little stupid. He spent a lot of time saying very obvious things, and each time people acted like he was quite intelligent.

  * Where the butter was kept in the kitchens.




 

That was about it, aside from some of the more ridiculous goings-on of the elven court, which she learned entirely against her will. Elven social hierarchy apparently was constructed on a delicate framework of good breeding, age, and whatever rumors had ever been attached to a person for the last thousand years, and Mirkwood elves seemed to speak of little else. Thranduil in particular was fond of gathering large groups of elves together simply to whisper a few words into one elf’s ear, reminding them of some minor umbrage done to a cousin's friend three hundred years before, and then Thranduil sat back and watched chaos spread as a result. The only elf who seemed immune to it was Tauriel, whose name inspired dramatic eyebrow wriggling that seemed to mean something to all involved.

 

It reminded Bella of the Faerie courts she’d heard of as a child, the old stories of winged kings and queens who would steal babies and whose monarchy rested firmly on debauchery and cruelty in equal turns. She wondered if the writers of those tales had passed through the Mirkwood.

 

When Bella felt at her lowest, she would often wander back to the Company, to hover near Ori, who tried his hardest to keep up the spirits of the others with word games and requests for old stories, or Thorin. In the darkness of the Ring, Bella could admit it made her feel more excited than guilty, to look upon him in secret. She could not decide if, if she were to remove the ring and reveal she were alive and well, she would be more horrified to  **have to show him her Ring, he might take it,** or that he might see in her face that she'd seen him drool in his sleep.

 

One evening, as Balin convinced Dwalin (for the twelfth time) that eating elven food repeatedly would not turn him into an elf, Bella watched with a small spark of interest as Thorin himself looked down at his food and abandoned it to the corner of his cell, leaning his face against the bars.

 

“She’s out there,” he murmured to himself. “She’s safe. She’s fine, and it’s good.”

 

Was Thorin talking about...Bella? He had to be; Dis was in a cell just down the way, and they could hear her fussing over Fili's braids.

 

“I wonder what she would do,” Thorin murmured, casting his eyes over the endless echoing halls of Mirkwood, over the cell doors set into the sheer walls all around him. “Save us all, I imagine.”

 

Balin looked across the way at Thorin, setting down his own meal. “Thranduil has said nothing of Miss Baggins, then.”

 

“No.” Thorin grit his teeth. “I insulted him so thoroughly I thought he would have to reveal that he held her captive, if only to see me wounded. But he said nothing; I do not believe he even knows that she was ever with us.”

 

Balin nodded. “Good, good. Then she is not at his mercy.”

 

“But she may be at the mercy of the spiders.” Thorin turned away. “Or starving, wandering the forest.”

 

“Now, Thorin, I know you cannot possibly underestimate our Bella so,” Balin proclaimed. “By my count this forest has been her fourth near death experience on this Quest! Surely after trolls and wargs and goblins, she can keep herself out of trouble. Perhaps we’ll escape this place and find her with one foot on Smaug’s corpse and the Mountain Crown and Arkenstone in each hand.”

 

Thorin snorted. “And the Crown of Earth atop her curls, I presume.”

 

Balin snorted, shaking his head. “No, I do not think she could quite manage stealing it from under Dis' nose, but I imagine she'd give it back in good enough time. And Bella would make a lovely monarch. There would be five meals a day for every citizen and flowers blooming all over the slopes of Erebor.”

 

“She would be far too skillful at it. Perhaps I should abdicate now.”

 

Bella snorted. She’d be a ludicrous leader, but it was nice of Thorin to say otherwise.

 

“Nonsense. She’ll need a King to boss around, won’t she? Someone to delegate all the dreary things to.” Balin chuckled. "And a Consort, I suppose. Once her lack of beard is gotten over, she will become quite popular, I am certain."

 

“Yes, well.” Thorin ducked his head, smiling; Bella smiled back at it, unable to help herself.  She wasn’t actually sure what to make of their conversation in the first place, except that it made her feel all bubbly on the inside. “You say that as if Bella would consent to having a Consort at all.”

 

“I think Bella could yet surprise you,” Balin said, and...he didn’t seem to be joking anymore. “I could hardly think she would disdain a lifelong companion, as some do. Not the woman who cried upon being called Dwarf-friend. No, I think you would find she would quite suffer, were she to have to rule alone.”

 

“Having friends is quite different from--” Thorin paced his cell. “I am glad, at least, we have been able to offer her what compan--friendship we may. Aule willing, we may yet continue it.”

 

The conversation turned to the well-worn topic of the structural weaknesses of their cells, and Bella wandered off into the hallways.

 

Bella wandered away from the Company, contemplating this. Balin was right, of course. It had meant the world to her to be called Dwarf-friend, and she had thought about marriage more than she really ought to have, in her life. Her parents had been Twined--their souls said to be made of stuff made to grow together, into something stronger for the connection. Couples who Twined lived for each other, grew to greatness through each other--it was said that Twined hobbits in the first blush of love glowed with the health of it, that they could be seen for true lovers by even the most begrudging elders. And of course the phenomenon of Fading, of Twined hobbits being unable to survive the death of their loved one, was well known. It was impossible for Bella to be raised by such a love, to grow in the brightness of it, and not want something so vital and deep for herself, even if she had seen her own mother Fade.

 

Bella wanted to be that happy. Or to at least, to know that she was even capable of it. When Bella had thought she was gay, she had thought, well, that's alright. We might not be able to get married, but if I Twine with a man, we can have tea, sneak kisses behind closed doors. If we are careful, we can live quite well. But being a woman, when she had once been known as Bilbo Baggins, was necessarily a more public affair than kissing. In Bree, it became the height of foolishness to consider any Man, although as a serving girl she'd received attentions. One hand under her skirts and there would be disappointment at best, the stones again at worst.

 

 **Oh, but she could have love, she could have the desire of men.** No, she really couldn’t, though it was nice to pretend for a moment; to feel the momentary heart-flutters as she looked at broad shoulders... **Oh, but she could. The dwarves liked her. She was so useful, what with her Ring.** They were her friends. That was all, and really, she should be grateful for just that. She’d never had friends, not since she was a tiny child. **But oh, she could be more. She could be the Queen, couldn’t she? _They'd_ said that.**

 

 **Why shouldn’t she be Queen? She had survived this Quest as well as anyone else--and she was a Dwarf-Friend. Thorin should marry her for her Ring alone, it was so nice.** But she wasn’t...what he wanted. She was round, she was a hobbit, she...she had been born a man. She had a man’s body, in every way. No man looked for that in a wife, let alone a Queen. She did not dare imagine his reaction to her body. Shock? Anger? A hand raised to strike her?

 

**But what if it were different?**

 

 **The mental image shifted. Now,** when Bella pulled her dress over her head, and loosened her stay enough to let Thorin see her chest, **he would know only to kiss her until she shiver, to kneel and be hers, to be--**

 

No. That wasn’t possible.

 

**But what if it wasn’t impossible? The Ring, it could make anything possible. It had given her friends, and a purpose. It had let her survive the Spiders, and now she got to hide in the Elf-king’s halls, stealing and spying and all sorts of nice things. The Ring would bring her everything she wanted; she would be Thorin’s Queen, precious beyond measure and gilded as only the wealth of the dwarves could make her, powerful as only the Ring could make her. Nothing could give her the body she wanted, but on a golden throne with a gilded crown and a dragon's head, she could _make_ them respect her, she could be feared and adored--**

 

Wait, what? No.

 

**She could be Queen, woman on high, _woman true,_ dwarves worshipping the ground she walked on, no one would ever think she was different or broken, only that she was absolute and terrible--**

 

 _What?_ No!

 

When Bella had been stoned, when Marjorie Cotton and others had thrown rocks so that the fine bones of her feet had broken, she had still had to walk away. She was, after all, exiled, and the mob had only held themselves back because her own grandfather had pleaded that she be allowed til sundown to be out of the Shire. She had deliberately, carefully, walked the long lanes between Farmer Maggot’s crops and the Brandybuck holdings, down into Buckland, then into the Old Forest, then cross Buckleberry Ferry--she had had to pay four times the usual fee to convince the disgusted ferryman to take her across. Then she had walked into Bree, secured a room at the Prancing Pony, and then limped up to her room, with a polite request for a saucepan of water to clean her feet.

 

Bella did not think much of it at the time; it was simply what she'd had to do, just as she'd had to save Thorin's life on the hilltop, just as she'd had to keep going at every step of the quest. It occurred to Bella, quite often, that surrender was an option. But she'd continued, if only to see what was on the other side of pain. She was, perhaps, the most hobbitish hobbit of all for it.

 

She'd never thought of it as a strength, but it was one. Perhaps her greatest one.

 

Bella stared at her hand, where the Ring sat, glowing in the half-world of its own making. She looked at the shaking of her tired hands, at the world drained of all substance and beauty that surrounded her. She had never noticed how deep the shadows were in this world, as if the black stripes thrown by each mounted torch were dizzy voids that she could fall into and be lost forever. She had never noticed how her own heartbeat seemed to slow, almost as if she were in a dreamless sleep. She had noticed that the Ring was as pretty as any flower--but she had never noticed that she had no reason to believe this of such a plain, simple ring.

 

Bella ripped the Ring from her finger, and flung it into the shadows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back from semi-hiatus! This is honestly a pretty good chapter to return on; it's one of the ideas that got me writing this fic in the first place. I feel like we all have moments when we're daydreaming and realize we've envisioned a scenario that's completely unrealistic--for me, there's several in rotation involving Richard Armitage and a brownstone filled with bookshelves, because I am actually unbearably lame. When the daydream is less a daydream and in fact an evil Ring trying to get you to come over to the Dark Side, you might be like "well, hey, a Ring cannot actually make these things happen, why am I thinking this, maybe this Ring that makes the entire world look like a ghostly horror realm is Not Good." And the Bella of this fic is going to be far less likely to listen to her own daydreams.
> 
> Fun fact! Originally the Ring offered Bella daydreams of breasts and children, but I felt that was too on the nose, and I don't think there's enough representation in fanfiction of the type of people who just don't care about children, not to hate or love them or really think about them at all. And the Ring is probably not an expert on gender, but I think it would see power as a more tempting solution to Bella's desires.
> 
> A note: I can't remember if I've talked about it before in this fic, but in this dwarven society, Kings and Queens needn't necessarily be a married couple; that's why there's talk of a Consort as well as the King. I don't want anyone to get their hopes up about polyamory; I'm fond of it in fic as a whole, but that's not what's going on here in particular.
> 
> The next chapter will probably come soon as I'm feeling especially vain recently.


	14. In Which Bella Is Seen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific triggers: None, as far as I can tell? Tell me if it does.

_“Bloody--!”_ Bella stumbled forward, and the world pinwheeled and reeled before her; the wood floor gave way before her and an opening slid into view, filled with rushing water. Bella stumbled back, falling onto her back, and the opening closed, but Bella was left off-balance herself, the world spinning so much she couldn't even think of moving.

 

Bella stayed like that for a while. She might have screamed a little, she wasn’t sure. The entire world was a din, a great rushing of sound and light and color. She saw bright spots of colors that she had never seen before, heard crashing and creaking that deafened, smelled acrid odors that made her face twist in agony.

 

When Bella was better able to discern reality, she found that she was laying at the bottom of the stairs in Thranduil's wine cellar. The colors that had overwhelmed her were dusky browns, greens, and magentas of casks and bottles; the sounds, the gentle settling of wood and soft elven footsteps above; and the smell, the sweet-acrid, dusty tang of a well-developed, ancient cellar. It was luck that she laid against a wood floor, which was of course dead to her earth-sense, or else that might have blinded her yet further. The Ring had rolled under a shelf of barrels; she could see it when she flopped her head to the left, glimmering in the dust.

 

It was just a ring, or so she had thought, not but a few minutes ago. But It had spoken in her mind--she was sure now, as she viewed it all from this new distance. The ring had planted those thoughts in her mind.  It had made her feel clever and useful; and she had accepted that, for she had been grasping so badly for it. It had leeched away every sensation, all color and shade; and she had accepted it, for she had often experienced periods where the world felt so drained, and it was hard to distinguish the metaphorical from the reality. But then had reached still further than her mind and body, whispering dark promises. Promises that were darkly tempting, true, with their whispered security, and  _power._ But Bella had never had much power in her life; more fool the ring for thinking she would know, or want to know, what to do with such a thing.

 

Gollum had sung hobbit songs, had been the size of a hobbit and spoken the language of hobbits, and Gollum had coveted that Ring. Was that what a hobbit became, what a person became, when they succumbed to the Ring? Could Bella have truly turned into such a creature, her flesh turned monstrous and grey, her eyes bulbous and fixed only on its golden glimmer? Could her heart have become cold and grasping?

 

Bella wrapped her arms around themselves and shuddered. It had sought for her, and It had nearly got her. Perhaps if it had chosen a different hobbit; a Sackville-Baggins, or some of the more annoying Proudfoots, who wished for power in their own small ways: to be the most dignified, the fattest, the one to harvest prize-winning tomatoes. Bella even ten years ago would have been tempted, but walking away from everything one once knew, from her species right on down to the silver spoons in her drawers, brought new perspective. She could hope she would never have been tempted by such a dark vision of queenliness, but all Bella knew was that it held no appeal for the woman she was know. One point in her favor, she supposed.

 

She couldn’t leave It where It was. But Bella didn’t want to touch It. If a ring could trick, it could trick again, certainly. But it would be worse, to leave it where it might come into the possession of an elf, where it might corrupt the mind of a higher and mightier creature than a hobbit

 

Bella managed to get to her knees and remove her backpack. Taking up a hank of her sleeve, she pawed under the barrels and fished out the Ring, glowing molten gold against dark blue. For a moment, her mind’s eye was filled with aught but fire, a dark figure looming in the middle. But she managed to shove the Ring into the bottom of her pack, and stand.

 

“Now. What can I do now that everyone will be able to see me?” Bella muttered. “Well, certainly stop standing about and talking to myself, for one.”

 

Bella looked around; the larger floor of the storeroom was quite empty, and the quality of the light was silvery in shade, suggesting that it was night. (It was still entirely too bright for Bella.) There was a large, rectangular section of the center of the floor that seemed to sit independently of the rest of it; Bella touched it with one boot, and it gave slightly, opening to darkness and rushing water. That was right, she had heard of their river-based delivery system. Bella turned to the stairs, thinking to steal up them and away, to regroup herself somewhere else.

 

But the door at the top opened, and Tauriel stood at the top of the stairs, her hand at her sword.

 

Bella looked at Tauriel.

 

Tauriel looked at Bella.

 

“I do not know you,” Tauriel said. Her eyes passed over Bella’s gloves, her heavy coat and her overly fancy belt.

 

“No.” Bella shrunk away. “Er…”

 

“Were you the one that was screaming?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Tauriel stepped down the stairs, her eyes casting around the wine cellar. “Did someone attack you?”

 

“No, I was...disoriented. I haven’t eaten...well, or sometimes at all.” That was even true. It had been at least a full day since she’d last eaten.

 

There were footsteps approaching the cellar door; Bella found herself being pressed into the shadows in the eave by the stairs, Tauriel's slim fingers unexpectedly as strong as iron where they pressed into Bella's shoulder. Tauriel returned to the stairs as Legolas came down them. He paused halfway to swish his hair behind his shoulders.

 

“Tauriel? Is all well?”

 

“Yes. I thought I heard something, but it was the casks settling.”

 

“Alright.” Legolas walked into proper view. He was not dressed in armor like Tauriel, but instead in silver finery, wearing a circlet that resembled the flower crowns of Bella's youth. “Father bade me seek out more of his Dorwinion vintage for the revelry.”

 

Tauriel made shooing motions with her hand behind her back. Bella slipped into the dark space directly under the stairs; not a moment later, Legolas passed right by Bella.

 

“What of your father’s servants?" Tauriel asked. "Could they not retrieve it?”

 

“I volunteered. My father’s parties can be burdensome, at times, as I hope you’ll one day be allowed to know. It is refreshing to step away from the noise, even if only for a moment.”

 

“Well, then I am glad you are unburdened. The Dorwinion vintage is on that shelf, I believe.”

 

“So it is.” Legolas hefted a large wine bottle with intricate designs etched into the glass down from the shelf. He turned to smile at Tauriel. If he glanced away from Tauriel for even a moment, he might have spotted Bella’s eyes in the darkness under the stairs, but his gaze was fixed. “Tauriel, I--”

 

“I am sorry, Legolas, but I do not have time to spare in conversation. I must get back to my rounds.”

 

“Of course. Please give your men my regards.” Legolas walked past Bella, but still he did not see, now focused on inspecting his own feet. “I will see you later. Tauriel.”

 

Tauriel sighed as his footsteps retreated. She stretched one hand into the darkness under the stairs “Come. Follow me, and keep very quiet.”

 

Bella stepped out of her hiding place. “Why are you helping me?”

 

“We don’t have time to spare. If you wish to escape Mirkwood with your life, we must move now.”

 

“I’m not leaving just yet! I have to save the dwarves.”

 

Tauriel stalked to the top of the stairs, peering down the corridor. “That is a foolish quest, and if you have walked these halls any length of time, then you know it. Now, come with me.”

 

Bella scrambled up the stairs and fell into step behind Tauriel. She was so exposed. **Maybe if she just** \--no. “It may be foolish, but I still must save them! Their fate, _our_ fate, lies in Erebor, not starving to death in your king's dungeon.”

 

“Erebor?” Tauriel actually looked back at that. “What business does your Company have at that ill-fated crag?”

 

“Uh.” Oh dear, nobody was supposed to know that. But Tauriel was helping her escape... “Well. I can tell you it is for the best of reasons.”  
  


“The best of reasons would be the reason of slaying the dragon,” Tauriel muttered, slinking around a corner and leading Bella deftly among the forks and twists of the blastedly high pathways of Mirkwood. “And it would be brooking true foolishness to attempt such a thing with fourteen dwarves and--what are you, precisely?”

 

"I am a hobbit. And I'm--I'm the equal to any dragon, thank you very much." Ohhhh, my, that didn't sound even remotely confident.

 

Tauriel shook her head. "Hold your thoughts for a moment. We must pass through the common areas now."

 

They walked the dark corridors of Mirkwood, following ways that circumnavigated the noises of merriment that echoed through the halls and avoided people, as a whole. Once, a reveler stumbled past them and Bella had to literally hide behind Tauriel’s skirts; but they made it past, and to a quiet set of hallways. Tauriel opened one door with a small, leaf-shaped key.

 

It was, apparently, Tauriel’s own quarters. There was a bed, desk, and wardrobe, which even for elves looked so generic as to be bland, and a green chest that that sat at the end of the bed, so old that all distinguishing features it might have once had were worn away. The only point of difference or color in the room was a tapestry that hung on the far wall. It depicted a large number of dark-skinned elves with dark radiances of hair, bowing to a pale, blonde elf who stood in front of the throne of Mirkwood. His hand was outstretched to the closest dark-skinned elf, who kneeled before him and held the bone and red leaf crown Bella had seen on Thranduil’s own head. The woman in the tapestry held the crown well above her head, so that it nearly touched the pale elf’s outstretched fingers. The crown, and the pale elf’s head were both encircled by stitched nimbuses of ethereal blue light, which radiated thin spars of light that plunged to the very edges of the tapestry; the rest of the tapestry was deep browns and greens, a darkness that the pale elf broke with his mere presence.

 

“That tapestry depicts the day when my people accepted Oropher as lord of the Greenwood, in the beginning of the Second Age. The woman with the crown is Mithrellas, my mother, who gave her throne to him.”

 

“Oh.” Elves were just rolling in royalty, weren't they? Bella walked over to the tapestry, reached up to trace her fingers of Mithrellas’ dark, outstretched hands. They were beautiful hands, even in supplication. “Are your people native to this forest, then?”

 

“No, no, we were just the first to settle here. My people come from the east, as yours did, naturally.”

 

Bella turned to look at Tauriel; she looked quite serious. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

 

“Well...Your, our, complexion, it is a sign of our heritage. We are people of the far Eastern lands, beyond even the lands of those that men call Easterlings.” Tauriel frowned. “Do you not come directly from the East?”

 

“No! My people, hobbits, that is, live to the west, near Rivendell, in a place called the Shire. We knew our people had come to that land from somewhere else, but the East--!” Bella smiled at Tauriel, for there was no expression that could properly convey her disbelief and astonishment. “You have just told me more about our people’s history than we have ever known. It is most often thought that it is simply a fluke of biology, that some of us are dark-skinned than others. And we had no idea that there were dark-skinned people of other races! The only other non-hobbit with such coloring that I have met was the shapeshifter Beorn, but he seemed rather exceptional what with the turning into a bear, and oh, I do believe I am talking too much. I apologize. For talking and...not being from the East. You have quite shaken my worldview.”

 

Tauriel put a hand on Bella’s shoulder, her eyes kind. “No, please. Do not apologize when you did nothing wrong. I admit I would have liked to have met someone from the East, but you are just as well. I have long lived here with no one at all who looked like me.”

 

“Is there no one else?” Bella looked at the tapestry. “But there are so many of you there!”

 

“Most of my people left at the end of the Second Age, when Sauron’s defeat made it possible to cross back to the East, to our ancestral lands.” Tauriel rolled a shoulder and went over to her chest. She pulled out a cloak and waterskin. “The rest sailed to the Undying Lands. I only lingered here because it was my mother's land, once, and I wanted to ensure it was protected. But now, it is time for me to go.”

 

“It is?” Bella hardly had a handle on the fact that dark-skinned elves had settled Mirkwood, much less that her own heritage apparently laid in the East. And now Tauriel was leaving? For such long-lived creatures, elves were quite dramatic and quick-tempered, when they got down to it. “Where are you going?”

 

“I am going to the East to Erebor, with you and your Company, then on further, when your deeds are done.”

 

“You’re going to help us?”

 

“Yes.” Tauriel threw her cloak about her shoulders and attached her waterskin to her belt.

 

“But I don’t know you. You have no reason to help us--your king holds my dwarves captive! You are the captain of his guard, last I checked.”

 

“Last that I made count, Mistress Hobbit, you seek to kill a dread dragon who has caused grief to many, you are headed in the general direction of what remains of my dear kin, and, my king is the mad son of the one who conquered and broke the spirit of my mother queen.” Tauriel tossed her hair behind her shoulder. She ought to have looked haughty; she looked regal. “To add to all this, I really must get out of Mirkwood before Legolas attempts to ask for my hand again. It is becoming embarassing, for him and for myself. Frankly, there has never been a better set of excuses to go and see the world than the ones I am burdened with at the moment.”

 

"But you still have no reason to help  _me_. You captured my friends, and elves have no love for dwarves. I do not see why you would see this as enough to leave your life behind, to ally yourself with our Quest."

 

Tauriel took Bella’s hand in hers. She twisted them, looking at their light palms together, then turning them to look at their dark fingers intertwined, Tauriel’s a near black next to Bella’s freshly churned brown.

 

“I have not seen someone who looked like me in two hundred years,” Tauriel whispered, almost reverent, her eyes locked on Bella’s hand. “It is too good and dear a sight to lose. _That_ is enough.”

 

Bella fought for words. Bella could not relate to the feuds of elves, to spurning suitors and escaping mad courts. But being alone...that, she could understand. “Bella.”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“My name is Bella Baggins.” She grinned. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

 

\--*--

 

“Tauriel! What are you--” Kili frowned, then grinned, hugely, as he spotted Bella trailing behind the tall elf. “Bella! You’re alive!”

 

There were shouts from every cell; Thorin’s was loudest and quickest, a barked “Bella!” that echoed in her ears. She peered around the corner, looking over to Thorin’s cell. His face was at the bars, and very nearly through them. He was staring at her.

 

“Surprise?” Bella flapped her hand at Tauriel. “I, er, made a friend. We’re getting you all out of here.”

 

Thorin took a fraction of a second to shoot a thunderous glare at Tauriel, and the way Kili was hugging her around the waist. Then his attention flicked back to Bella. “Where have you been? We thought the spiders must have taken you.”

 

“Oh, here and there.” Bella almost laughed to herself. She held Thorin's cell door open as it was unlocked, making sure he could see the honest penitence in her face. “I am sorry I couldn’t get you free earlier. I was trying to figure out a way to get you out of here, but Mirkwood is very securely guarded. And I kept having to sleep, it was quite vexing.”

 

“Bella. You have done well by living.” Thorin took hold of Bella’s hands, turning them in the light. His hands were  _very_ different from Tauriel’s. “You have not been hurt by the elves?”

 

“No, I am quite well.” Bella shrugged, and smiled for him; it felt good just to smile at him. Why had she spent so many weeks hiding in plain sight, when she could have spoken to him? Weeks in a half-world, when she could have held his gaze? “I’ll be better for leaving Mirkwood, but I’m not yet defeated, Thorin.”

 

Thorin patted her hand, slowly, then drew away as the Company assembled around them. “So you have a plan for our escape.”

 

Tauriel looked at Bella.

 

Bella looked at Tauriel. Surely she had some sort of plan. She was captain of the guard.

 

Tauriel shook her head slightly, looking surprised, and raised her eyebrows at Bella. What, now Bella had to come up with some sort of plan? Tauriel got to be the beautiful, fair, tall, elven princess guardswoman, with the glorious ideals and glamorous past, and _Bella_ still had to be the one to come up with the plan?

 

Wait.

  
“Yes.” Bella grinned at Thorin, widely. Too widely. “Yes, we do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to post this, like, over a week ago! OOPS. The delay has a lot to do with my process in writing this fic. You see, I write the chapters well in advance, but when I post them, I do actually go back and edit them, and sometimes I edit them quite a lot. The changes I made to the last chapter before posting it meant I had to change a lot of this one to fit, and I sat here for a few days turning Tauriel and Bella's interactions over in my head. I wanted them to feel at least a little realistic, to really sell that Tauriel would decide to join them at this stage. Hopefully you all like it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully nobody hates this??? Hopefully??? I like writing it, so I'm hoping I'm not getting it too wrong. I'm trying at least, but as I mentioned in the summary, I'm a white, cisgender woman writing a trans woman of color, so obviously I can't full understand the trans or POC experience. Hopefully I can translate it well enough for this particular rendition of The Hobbit. Please tell me if I've gotten anything badly wrong, so I can fix it and not get it wrong again in later chapters.


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